Collectives Hub: Work Show Grow

Tomorrow’s Archive is Work Show Grow’s collective response to the theme Future Histories.

After a group discussion, we decided to respond to one question: If someone discovered your photograph in 100 years’ time, why would it matter?

The responses revealed a shared desire to preserve the things that rarely make it into history books. Some artists turned their attention to family, grief and love. Others looked at changing landscapes, migration, community, conflict and small everyday rituals. Natasha Caruana reflects on grief through gardening, using flowers as a way to remain connected to her late mother across three generations. Karen Block’s photographs of the abandoned villages surrounding Chernobyl remind us that the consequences of today’s decisions can still shape landscapes a century from now. Kate Carpenter finds significance in the ordinary, asking us to value the everyday moments that so often define our lives.

Together, these photographs ask what future generations might need to understand about us – not through headlines or major events, but through the lives we were living, the relationships that were important to us, and the things we chose to notice. Photography has always helped us understand the past. Every photograph we make today becomes part of tomorrow’s history. This collection reminds us that history isn’t only made through world-changing events. It’s also found in the everyday – in the people we love, the places we inhabit, the memories we choose to preserve.

These photographs are more than records of the present. They are fragments of a future archive, made for people who may one day look back and ask not only who we were, but what mattered to us.

Exhibiting photographers:
Amanda Eatwell
Becky Mursell
Cindy Lin
Emilie Grand-Clement
Esther Godoy
Fiona Bailey
Jessie DiBlasi
Karen Block
Kate Carpenter
Katya de Grunwald
Kayleigh Peters
Lu Mazen
Madalina Androne
Monique van de Wijdeven
Nastassja Nefjodov
Natasha Caruana
Petra Aanraad
Seema Khalique
Shira Bar
Stuart Leech
Tim Stubbs Hughes
Una Hunderi
Vera Hadzhiyska
Ziggy Kolker