Johnnie Shand Kydd: Ramsholt
19 April – 7 June 2026


Johnnie Shand Kydd began his career in the 1990s at the centre of London's art scene. He photographed Tracey Emin, Kate Moss and Sam Taylor-Johnson with a candid instinct that put him in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and the National Portrait Gallery. His early images had a raw energy born partly from access and partly from imperfection. He was there, he was trusted, and he kept clicking.

Ramsholt is the result of a very different kind of attention. For this project, Shand Kydd returned again and again to the same 50-minute walk through Ramsholt, a small village on Suffolk's Bawdsey Peninsula. He shot on analogue film. He worked slowly, embracing chance and imperfection as methods rather than problems.

The photographs record fields, river paths, mudflats and bare woodland: a landscape that is quiet, ordinary and, on closer inspection, full of absence.

The images are black and white. They carry a stillness that takes time to settle into. Friends described them as looking either "about death" or "like crime scenes." Shand Kydd didn't disagree. There's no attempt here to make the landscape more than it is. The work trusts that looking carefully at an ordinary place, over a long period of time, is enough.

Ramsholt is also a book, due for release in May 2026. Advance copies will be available to buy during the show. The exhibition at TKE Studios brings the photographs into a gallery context for the first time, alongside Shand Kydd's long connection to TKE and its founder, Dame Tracey Emin.