El Hardwick (they/them) is a London based photographer, musician and director. their multidisciplinary practice also encompasses workshop facilitation and curatorial work for events, exhibitions and publications.
As a teenager, they began uploading their photographs to Flickr, where they became part of a community of pioneering adolescent photographers online seeking to reclaim image making from the patriarchal gaze. Often placing the vastness of landscape photography alongside portraiture, Hardwick’s work explores how a body takes up space. At once cinematic and naturalistic, the environments seen in their images play as much of a role in the story as the people within them. Whilst their early work explored searching for teenage belonging in rural spaces, it was particularly after they left school to pursue photography, and moved to London, where they found the queer community they had been searching for. They believe in deconstructing the inherent voyeurism of photography by engaging participants not as subjects, but empowered protagonists in dialogue with their surroundings.
el has exhibited in London, Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Oxford, Lisbon and Brighton, at galleries including The V&A Museum, Palais De Tokyo, The Southbank Centre and The Cob Gallery. they have also performed their music internationally and done talks on their work for Oxford university, Cambridge University and london college of communication.
they have been featured by platforms including Dazed, i-D, BBC Radio 4, British Vogue, The Guardian, The British Journal Of Photography, The Independent, gay times, purple fashion, buffalo zine, crack magazine, them, the wire, huck & more. for a list of their commercial photographic clients, see here.
february 2026 will see the publication of their debut hardback photography book t-fags, created in collaboration with director-writer orion isaacs. it contains over 50 photographs and interviews with trans men, transmasculine and non-binary people who identify with the term fag. their previous paperback book celestial bodies was selfpublished in 2016, created in collaboration with their sister rachel hardwick and usa-based photographer chrissie white.
2020 saw the release of el hardwick’s debut album, titled 8, released on 33-33. a climate fiction told in three mediums, the lp is accompanied by a 40-page book of poetry and photographs taken in collaboration with chrissie white, clara pathe and justina goldbeck. their follow up record, process of elimination, came out in 2024 on ad 93. it explores themes of rewilding the body, through the lenses of both their non-binary identity and experience of sickness, as teachers for anti-capitalist modes of being.
in 2020 el launched desire lines: a series of occasional multidisciplinary projects that centre community healing at the intersection of music, art and ecology.