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 an online community of pioneering adolescent photographers seeking to reclaim portraiture from the patriarchal gaze. Hardwick’s work often unites the vastness of landscape photography alongside intimate portraiture. At once cinematic and naturalistic, the environments seen in their images play as much of a role in the narrative as the people within them. Whilst their early work explored searching for teenage belonging in rural spaces, it was 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.
in february 2026 el will publish their debut hardback photography book t-fags, created in collaboration with their partner 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 self published in 2016, created in collaboration with their sister rachel hardwick and usa-based photographer chrissie white.
el’s most recent 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. this followed their debut album, titled 8, which was released on 33-33 in 2020. 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.
in 2020 el launched desire lines: a series of occasional multidisciplinary projects that centre community healing at the intersection of music, art and ecology.