Headline Exhibition
Upstairs from Glossop Market Hall in the The Old Town Hall event space is the Main Exhibition for Festival ‘26.
As part of this year’s Dark Peak Photo Festival, this two-part exhibition presents a contemporary selection of photographers responding to the theme of Identity. Shown in The Old Town Hall above the newly refurbished Glossop Market Hall, the exhibition brings together diverse photographic practices that explore how identity is seen, shaped and communicated through the lens.
The work on display spans street photography capturing everyday encounters, experimental portraiture that questions how we present and perceive ourselves, and projects that reflect on the photographer’s own identity — what they notice, frame and reveal through the act of making images. Together, these approaches offer multiple entry points into the theme, encouraging visitors to engage with photography as both a personal and cultural language.
Presented in two interconnected parts, the exhibition creates a dialogue between outward observation and inward reflection: how identities are constructed in public spaces, and how the photographer’s perspective becomes part of the story being told. Rather than offering fixed answers, the exhibition invites open interpretation and conversation.
Accessible and engaging, the exhibition welcomes both regular festival audiences and those encountering contemporary photography for the first time, offering space for reflection, curiosity and connection at the heart of the Dark Peak Photo Festival.
Adam Docker
Motion and Emotion is a compelling collection exploring identity, intimacy, and presence. Spanning portraits, cultural documentary, and conceptual imagery, the work captures fleeting moments often overlooked, revealing quiet beauty in the everyday. Invites viewers to pause, reflect, and immerse themselves in moments suspended in time
Adam Docker is a London-based cinematographer and portrait photographer whose work explores movement, atmosphere, and emotional presence. With over 25 years’ experience and projects spanning more than 90 countries, his photography is shaped by a cinematic eye and a deep curiosity for human stories, intimate moments, and unscripted encounters. Blending available light, subtle artificial lighting, and movement, his portraits aim to “catch something in the act and see how it becomes something else.” His work has been widely recognised, including being a two-time Portrait of Britain winner (2021 and 2025), selections for Portrait of Humanity (2021 and 2023), and recognition from Lens Culture and The Independent Photographer.
Adrian Lambert
Antumbra unique series of portraits unifies psyche and skin, revealing the person from the dark depths to the surface.
According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a person is a combination of the ideal self which we openly share, and the shadow self which we mask and project onto others to prevent being found out as imperfect. He concluded that to find authenticity we must integrate the ideal with the shadow. These photographs are mandalas for the shadow in all of us.
Adrian Lambert is a Glossop based two time British Journal of Photography Portrait of Britain winner. He has exhibited in the UK, Australia and The Netherlands. He makes photographs in response to the minor traumas and human predicaments from which the big issues of our time emerge.
Kate Bellis
Earth Bound portraits, created through hand printed cyanotype processes and richly toned with natural materials gathered from the land from oak galls, earth and botanicals. She reveals the deeply rooted lives of farmers, quarry workers and stone masons who shape and sustain the earth beneath our feet. Her images fuse human presence with the very soil and geology of the Derbyshire landscape.
Kate Bellis grew up on a small farm in Devon before studying photography at Nottingham Trent University, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 1991. An early award from the Observer Young Photojournalist of the Year led to extensive travel and published work across China, Tibet, India, Ireland, Uganda and Kurdistan, often focusing on communities whose lives are closely bound to the land.
Since settling in Derbyshire in the late 1990s, Bellis has concentrated on long-term projects with hill-farming and rural communities, including the widely exhibited Gathering. She has published three books On the Edge, Gathering and HILLand her work has appeared in numerous national and international publications. She lives and works in the Derbyshire Peak District.
Robert John Watson
Pride : These photographs, made at Manchester Pride over several years, focus on the intimate moments at the edges of the crowd rather than the spectacle of the parade. Working observationally in analogue film, the series captures fleeting gestures of vulnerability, connection, and ease in public space. The work invites us to see Pride not as a single event but as the everyday presence of people living openly as themselves.
Robert John Watson is a British photographer with a gift for capturing the unvarnished beauty of everyday life. Armed with his Leica, Watson documents fleeting moments that reveal the raw depth of human emotion and the quiet complexity of urban existence. His work is defined by a rare honesty and a commitment to being exactly where he needs to be when it matters most.
Watson works from his studios and darkroom based in the North West of England and is represented in London by Albumen Gallery and in Manchester by Saul Hay Gallery.
Kat Wood
Beyond The Fields is a photographic project that celebrates and documents the resilience of twelve women farmers from the North of England. Through large-scale portraits and accompanying narratives, the project sheds light on the precarious realities of northern farming, particularly the growing need for women to diversify their livelihoods by pursuing second careers outside agriculture to sustain their land and communities.
Kat Wood is a multidisciplinary fine art photographer and analogue artist whose work explores the deep ties between rural life, traditional practices and alternative photographic processes. Trained in Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo shows and projects that reflect on hill farming, land stewardship and craft-based image making. Wood’s practice often involves sustainable and experimental techniques, connecting photography with community, landscape and material culture.
Kathryn McGeary
Our Clouded Hills explores themes of belonging, heritage, and identity through the landscapes surrounding Glossop. Rooted in generations of connection to this place, the work reflects an enduring relationship between land, memory, and lived experience.
Using analogue film and pinhole photography, the series captures the quiet persistence of time and the landscape’s role as an active storyteller. Part of a wider enquiry into impermanence and slow image-making, the work considers how memory and place intertwine beyond the speed of the digital age.
Kathryn McGeary is an emerging fine art photographer from Glossop whose work explores nature, memory, and emotion through analogue and alternative processes. Drawing on historical techniques, she creates ethereal, painterly images that invite reflection on impermanence and quiet resilience. Kathryn holds a First Class BA in Photography from London Metropolitan University, is a two-time AOP Student Award finalist, and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
