Olivia Arthur

Olivia Arthur is a London-based documentary photographer and visual artist. Her work explores themes such as gender, intimacy, the human body and physicality as well as the cultural influences of East and West. She studied mathematics at the University of Oxford and photojournalism at the London College of Printing before moving to Delhi in 2003 to become a photographer. Her early books, Jeddah Diary (2012) and Stranger (2015), document the daily lives of young women in Saudi Arabia and the story of a shipwreck in Dubai. By shifting to large-format portraiture, Olivia Arthur began examining the human relationship with the body, touch, physicality, and the intersection of the body and technology. This work became her third book Murmurings of the Skin, published in 2024. She is the co-founder of Fishbar, a publishing house and space dedicated to photography in London. Her most recent books A pocket of their own Shape and Lee and the Sea Things (both 2025) experiment with layering photography in the form of double exposures and collage. She is a member of Magnum Photos and served as its president from 2020-2021.

Olivia's Talk

Photography and Imagination

Olivia Arthur will discuss her journey from being a documentary photographer, working with magazines and newspapers, to working with and against the limitations of photography. She will share the different approaches she has used to challenge and play with these limitations and how this has led her to work with collage and other forms of layering. She will share some of the work she has made for children and discuss how children’s approaches to stories and ideas freed her up to explore wider forms of image making. Finally, she will express how this more imaginative approach freed her to explore the world of fashion photography and how doesn’t see this as disconnected from her more documentary work.