Tara Lumley-Savile is a documentary photographer with a background in Middle Eastern studies and modern languages. Based in London, she is of Caribbean, English and Indian heritage. From her time as a journalist in Jordan, and travels in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, she has developed a deep interest in storytelling around displacement and migration, gender, and art as intervention in social justice. She often works with archival material, including in documenting her own family histories. As part of this she has also explored the vicissitudes of memory, through recording physical manifestations of the decline of her grandmother’s dementia.

Themes of remembering and forgetting also emerge in her documentation of place, particularly through the transformation of her own neighbourhood: Tottenham, North London – a place which has experienced cultural shifts with rapid gentrification in the aftermath of the 2011 race riots.

In her final MA project: Indo-Caribbean, through archival material, she has explored themes of “deceptive indentureship”, shameful histories that unequally rendered women subaltern. Using a series of interviews and analogue portraits of London-based Caribbean families, she addresses the living impacts of colonisation on questions of belonging among the diaspora.  Reimagining post-colonial identities, she recognises the nuances of self-identification in migrant descendants.