Magali Nougarède is a French-born photographer and educator who completed the Editorial Photography BA (Hons) at the University of Brighton in 1996. She works in a multi-disciplinary, holistic manner across the disciplines of photography, art, education - and more recently, ecology and horticulture. She has been a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Photography at the University of South Wales since 2007. She also has a longstanding working relationship with by London based picture agency Millennium Images, with her work having been used for numerous book covers and press articles.
Over the years she has undertaken a diverse mix of cultural, commercial and educational projects and commissions, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally in the UK, France and the US. At the core of her photographic practice is the development of personal bodies of work. Early seminal works include the series Toeing The Line (2000, a Photoworks publication) and Crossing The Line (2003-2006, exhibited at Fotogallery, Cardiff). Her methodology involves the photographing of strangers, young and elderly, approached in the street. The use of close-up framing, flash and the particular treatment of colour, lead to images which are reminiscent of the studio portrait or even the studio still life, rather than the street photograph. The resulting semi-abstract portraits home in on personal details of clothing and body language as cultural signifiers. Some of this this work is discussed by fashion historian, Paul Jobling, in the recent book Fashion, Image, Identity - published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
