Liza Dracup is a contemporary photographer, researcher, and Senior Lecturer based in the North of England. Her practice-led research explores relationships between landscape, environment, photographic aesthetics, and collections-based inquiry. Working across experimental photographic methodologies, she investigates how photography can reveal, reinterpret, and reframe understandings of place, natural history, and cultural heritage.

 

Her work has received international recognition, including selection as a finalist for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2026, longlisting for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2025, and nominations for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012) and the Prix Pictet Award (2009).

 

Dracup's practice interrogates how photographic responses to specific landscapes and natural histories contribute to contemporary debates surrounding landscape aesthetics, environmental awareness, and the cultural significance of the local. Through experimental modes of image-making, she explores photography's transformative capacity to make visible overlooked, hidden, and peripheral aspects of landscape. Her work celebrates the extraordinary qualities of the ordinary, offering enriched perspectives on northern environments and their ecological and cultural histories.

 

She completed her doctorate, Photographic Strategies for Visualising the Landscape and Natural History of Northern England: The Ordinary and the Extraordinary, in 2017. Her wider research operates across artistic, scientific, ecological, and academic contexts, repositioning historical collections and archival materials through contemporary photographic practice. By connecting visual culture, natural history, and interdisciplinary research, her work continues an ongoing examination of the cultural, environmental, and social value of local landscapes and everyday experience.

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Image:

States of Becoming

Aesthetica Art Prize (2026)

York Art Gallery, York

17 July - 15 Nov 2026

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