William Joe Josephs Radford
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
William Joe Josephs Radford is a British-Spanish photographer based in Cheltenham. He works entirely in-camera, using long exposure, light painting, color gels, lens masking, and physical alterations to the lens instead of digital editing. His subjects circle around sex, religion, addiction, death, and the body, often placing visual beauty next to discomfort. He graduated with first-class honours from the University of Gloucestershire in 2021. At his graduation he arrived wearing black bin bags instead of academic robes, protesting the cost and ritual of the ceremony. The action went viral and was covered internationally.
Since then, his work has been shown in Arles, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Bangkok, and Barcelona, and featured on the covers of F-Stop and Al-Tiba9. He has received several international awards, including 1839’s Conceptual Photographer of the Year.
His recent body of work begins with White Knight, the first part of a trilogy made after the death of his father. The series uses Vaseline on the lens, red and blue light, and long exposures to create images that sit between sharpness and blur, presence and loss. Everyday objects appear again and again: shells, cigarettes, small personal items. They are staged, lit, and repeated until they start to carry emotional weight.
The following chapters, Gradient Loss and Residual Noise, move further away from control. Color is reduced, grain increases, and form becomes less stable. The process mirrors grief itself, shifting from clarity to distortion, from structure to noise. Across all three parts, everything happens in front of the camera. No composites. No digital construction. Only light, time, and physical intervention.
Radford’s work is technical, precise, and openly personal. The images look surreal, but they are built from real objects, real light, and deliberate actions. Photography becomes a way to stage inner states, not to illustrate them. Each picture is constructed, controlled, and slightly unstable at the same time.
