Cheryl Newman is a photographic artist whose work explores illness, memory, and the ethics of looking, often through the use of found imagery and collage. Her deeply personal projects, including Sick in Bed and Good Girl, interrogate themes of vulnerability, the female gaze, and family history.

Formerly Director of Photography at The Telegraph, Newman brings a sharp editorial sensibility to her visual storytelling, informed by decades of shaping other people’s narratives. She is also a long-standing mentor and advisory board member of the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, where she champions emerging photographers and advocates for the importance of personal work as the foundation of an authentic photographic voice.

The origins of Sick in Bed

Cheryl Newman never set out to become an artist of illness but when her daughter was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Newman discovered that her camera, the tool she had wielded professionally for years, suddenly felt intrusive, even violent.

“I just couldn’t do it,” she says. “I was really uncomfortable photographing my daughter when she was ill. It felt invasive, violent even. I knew I had the skills to make a beautiful image but that wasn’t the point. The camera created a barrier when what we needed was connection.”

This discomfort became the catalyst for her ongoing project Sick in Bed, a body of work that transforms personal trauma into a broader meditation on vulnerability, voyeurism, and the ethics of looking.

Rather than push through her discomfort or abandon the subject, Newman made a radical pivot. She stopped shooting and in place of her own images she began to collect found photographs. She assembled old photographs, discarded snapshots, family albums and long-forgotten prints, all images that resonated with her experience but maintained a crucial distance from her own family’s pain. The project that emerged, Sick in Bed, is a quietly devastating set of images drawn entirely from found photographs, intimate yet distanced, raw yet strangely tender.

“I needed to find a way to talk about vulnerability without exploiting it,” she says. “Found images gave me that, they allowed me to approach pain from a place of reflection, not intrusion.”

The ethics of looking

Newman’s shift to found photography wasn’t merely aesthetic, it was deeply ethical. “I have concerns about photographing people I don’t know, especially when they’re vulnerable” she explains. “I’ve always had that, even when I was commissioning other photographers. But it became personal when it was my own daughter.”

Newman is not the first photographer to wrestle with the ethics of the gaze. But few have made that internal conflict so central to their practice. Her work turns the question of “who has the right to look?” into a kind of refrain, a recurring tension that underpins everything from her image selection to her collage techniques. Every photograph, she suggests, involves a degree of looking that the subject may not have fully consented to, particularly when that subject is vulnerable.

“The camera is always about control,” she says. “There’s a power imbalance. And when you’re dealing with illness, with female bodies, with children, that imbalance becomes harder to justify.”

The Sick in Bed series doesn’t try to resolve that tension. It inhabits it. A spread might pair a bleached-out snapshot of a woman lying in bed with a fragment of a medical diagram or a torn-out magazine caption. “I’m not interested in telling a story with a clear narrative arc,” Newman says. “I want people to sit with the images and feel a kind of uncertainty, a discomfort because that’s closer to the reality.”

From Playgirl to family albums

There’s a deliberate radicalism in the materials Newman uses. In Sick in Bed the image selection is controlled and precise with no intervention from the photographer. But with other projects such as Good Girl (exploring “childhood and the expectations placed on women”) or Last Night We Had the Same Dream (dealing with “loss and memory”) she draws not only from anonymous domestic photography but also from 1970s pornographic magazines including old issues of Playgirl.

The juxtapositions are sometimes shocking: soft-focus nudes placed alongside childhood snapshots, domestic scenes recontextualised as sites of tension or unease. “It’s not about shock value,” she insists. “It’s about context. I grew up in the ’70s and that imagery was everywhere. The male gaze was the water we swam in. And now, with hindsight, I’m trying to unpick how that shaped our understanding of sexuality, illness, permission.”

Each work demonstrates Newman’s ability to weave together personal history with collective experience, using found photographs as bridges between individual trauma and shared cultural memory.

“My work connects to my personal history, including sexuality in the 70s,” Newman reveals, describing how her exploration of the female gaze extends beyond illness into broader questions of how women’s bodies and experiences have been commodified and consumed. In this context her incorporation of Playgirl magazines into her collages isn’t shock value, it’s a deliberate examination of how the male gaze has shaped our understanding of female sexuality and vulnerability.

The Architecture of Memory

The path her work has taken reveals a fascinating push and pull between Newman’s background as a photo editor at the Telegraph and her childhood interest in photo albums. “I’ve always been obsessed with sequence and juxtaposition,” she says. “Even as a child, I used to play with my parents’ photo albums, rearranging things, looking for patterns. I think that’s what I do now, just with different source material.”

It’s this playfulness combined with a trained professional eye for narrative construction that now serves her artistic practice: a dual perspective, both creator and curator, that allows her to see found photographs not just as objects, but as building blocks for new stories.

“I use found imagery and integrate personal and historical elements in my work,” Newman explains, describing a process that is both intuitive and methodical. The images she selects must resonate with her personal history while speaking to broader themes that transcend her individual experience.  That instinct is especially evident in her series Last Night We Had the Same Dream, which uses found photos to explore memory, grief and the psychic legacies of family life. “The dream title is key,” Newman says. “So much of what I do is about that blurred line between memory and invention between what happened and how we remember it.”

Exploring the personal

For Newman, personal work by photographers isn’t just important, it’s everything. “I’m only interested in their personal work,” she says of the photographers she’s commissioned over the years. “I want to hear their voice. Who are they? As an artist, I don’t want them to make something in the style of this or that. I want them to be fully present and to give me a story that’s from them.”

And it’s in personal work that Newman believes a photographer’s authentic voice emerges,  not in executing someone else’s vision but in exploring their own. “Most of my work is connected to my personal history,” she explains, whether it’s addressing illness, sexuality, or family. That lived connection gives the work emotional weight and truth. Personal projects, she argues, compel photographers to confront their own vulnerabilities, obsessions, and perspectives and that’s where real artistic identity is formed.

Sick mothers, slow art

Newman’s latest work returns once more to the family, this time focusing on her elderly mother. “She’s been sick, and I’ve been documenting parts of that,” she says. “But again, it’s complicated. Where’s the line between care and exploitation? What does it mean to tell someone’s story when they might not fully understand how it’s being told? I’m still figuring it out.”

What’s clear is that Newman isn’t in a rush. Her projects tend to unfold over years, not months. “I like long gestation,” she says. “I’ll collect images for a year before I even know what I’m doing with them. It’s not about reacting, it’s about listening.”

Holding on to joy

For all its seriousness, Newman’s practice is grounded in a kind of stubborn joy. “I talk about illness and trauma, yes but that’s not the whole picture,” she says. “There has to be joy somewhere. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

She credits her collaborators – curators, fellow artists, former students — for keeping her going. “I don’t work well in isolation,” she says. “We’re all navigating similar questions: How do you make ethical work? How do you keep going when it feels like the world doesn’t care? Community helps.”

Her hope for the future? More dialogue, more slowness, more collaboration. “I’m interested in working with others, in building something together. I think that’s where the real growth happens.”

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