Gabrielle Motola is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of photography, psychology, and lived encounter.
Her practice investigates intimacy, identity, vulnerability, and the ethics of looking. Using reality not as record but as material, she moves between portraiture, street, and landscape to explore what is constructed between subject and viewer.
Drawing on a background in psychology and a decade working as an editor and colourist in cinema, she approaches faces, streets, and landscapes as sites of emotional inquiry. Her work occupies a space between documentary and fine art, where meaning is negotiated rather than delivered.
Living in Iceland for three years led to her first book, An Equal Difference (2016), an ethnographic exploration of gender, crisis, and cultural resilience in post-2008 Icelandic society. Combining portraiture, journalistic examination, and reflective text, the book established an ongoing inquiry into how environment shapes behaviour, belief, and social structure.
Her second book, Elūl (2025), shifts the lens inward, examining perception, attachment, and the space between seeing and projection. Across both works runs a sustained investigation of human encounter, asking how social structures and personal perception shape the way we see and are seen.
Alongside her artistic practice, Motola develops frameworks that translate psychological insight into photographic method. A central strand of her work is street portraiture. What began as a personal confrontation with social fear evolved into a sustained investigation of approach, risk, and human connection. This inquiry informs her internationally taught “Exposure Therapy” workshops, translating psychological frameworks into embodied photographic practice.
A former AOP Board Member and Co-Chair of AOP F22, she continues to advocate for inclusion, equity, and sustainable practice across the photographic industry. She is a co-director and senior member of the Photobook Club Collective, contributing to its network and advancing sustainable, empowered approaches to photobook publishing, whether self-published or produced with established imprints.
She is currently writing Trust in Art Photography: Editioning and Sustainable Practice, a research-led inquiry examining how photographic art circulates, accrues value, and sustains trust in a reproducible medium, connecting creative integrity with business practice, transparency, and long-term sustainability.
Awards
2023 AOP Photography Awards: Portraiture Gold 2023 • Women Street Photographers 2023 • Portrait of Humanity2022 • Portrait of Britain 2022 • Head On Photo Festival 2022 • RPS IPE 164 Shortlisted 2022 • KLPA Awards 2022 • Women Street Photographers 2021 • Portrait of Britain 2021 • RPS IPE 163 Shortlisted 2021 • Julia Margaret Cameron Awards 2021 • Lucie Foundation Award 2020 • Equal Lens “Two Metres of Separation” 2020 • AOP Photography Awards 2019 • AOP Photography Awards 2018 • Taylor Wessing National Portrait Prize Shortlist 2014
Publications
Amateur Photographer - Peter Dench Reviews Elūl - February 2026
Royal Photographic Society - Photographing The Invisible- 2024
Photowalk Podcast Interviews 2020 - 2024
Soul of Street Issue 49 Feature Interview 2023
Capturing Emotive Portraits with the Sigma fpL
Tea & Water Talks 2021
JC Candanedo- A World That Others Can’t See 2020
Stranger Curiosity Podcast 2019 (Creator and Host)
Portraits of Strangers - Sean Tucker 2019
Henge to Henge - The Guardian 2018