Fergus Carmichael

Sproxton Award for Photography - 2025 winner

Fergus Carmichael is the 2025 winner of the Sproxton Award for Photography.

Finding Eden highlights the hidden tensions between queer identity and anxiety and the fragile reality of the environment. This body of work draws on ideas from queer ecology, often employing the self-portrait, particularly the male nude, to explore vulnerability in both overlapping spheres.

Historically, the male body has been idealised as strong. Fergus' work shows it differently, soft, exposed, unsettled and transient; becoming both subject and object, where personal, political, and environmental concerns collide. These landscapes aren’t just backdrops but collaborations, shaping how he moves and how the image evokes a broader sense of loss and urgency.

Artist statement

Fergus Carmichael uses photography as his visual language, a means of translating thought, emotion, and experience into something both seen and felt. His practice explores the fluid relationship between self and environment, with a focus on themes of identity, queer ecologies, landscape, the queer male nude, and the spaces they occupy.

He is drawn to the quiet intersections where personal histories and physical places converge, revealing how their surroundings shape who they are and how they exist in the world. By capturing his own life’s passage through self-portraiture within places that hold personal significance, landscapes tied to key moments of his growth from boyhood to manhood, he explores the dialogue between mortality and permanence.

Each image becomes a meditation on belonging, transformation, and the spaces that anchor our sense of identity. We all pass through this world, yet the landscapes we traverse outlive us. Taking influence from the pictorialist movement of photography, his work with self-portraiture, landscape and domestic settings, as well as the queer male nude, uses a multitude of techniques—digital, cyanotype, projection, and photo montage—to create with a unique sense of physicality, tangibility, and beauty.

Fergus's photography seeks to evoke introspection and empathy, inviting viewers to consider their own relationship with time, place, and self. It is an ongoing exploration of what it means to move through the world: to witness, to change, and to leave traces within the landscapes that endure.