Bio.
"Photography's answer to a noir detective”
About Chloe Nicholls
Photographer. Artist. Storyteller in stillness.
Chloe Nicholls is a Birmingham-based photographer whose lens is drawn to the quiet tensions and overlooked poetry of urban life. Her work focuses on city landscapes — especially the shifting textures of gentrification, the symbolic weight of doorways, and the fragmented narratives found in reflections.
Chloe’s deep interest in local history and forgotten stories shapes much of her photographic practice. Each image is a kind of excavation: capturing traces of what once was, what is being erased, and what lingers in the built environment. Her photos are not just visual records, but layered investigations into memory, space, and change.
Though her broader practice spans writing and visual art — often exploring organic forms and natural patterns — photography remains her primary medium. It’s where she feels most connected to place, most attuned to the unnoticed details that define a city’s soul.
Observational yet intentional, Chloe’s work invites viewers to pause, reflect, and rediscover the urban environments they move through every day.
Beyond her photographic work, Chloe is also a multidisciplinary artist working under the name ItsChloeBab — a space where personal insight meets creative expression. There, she shares a mix of fine art, fashion fits, poetry, blogging, and glimpses into her daily life as an artist. She also curates No Lactose Bab, a side blog dedicated to finding the best places to eat across the UK with a lactose allergy — blending food reviews with accessibility and lifestyle writing. Chloe collaborates closely with her partner, Callum, through TallTalesandTinyTruths — a personal joint project showcasing their co-created photography, visual art, poetry, and screenwriting. In addition, she is the founder and creative director of CherryBab, a large-scale collective and talent agency spotlighting female and femme-led creatives across the UK and beyond — encompassing artists, musicians, models, writers, DJs, and performers.
Mission Statement
My photography is a form of quiet witnessing — an attempt to preserve, question, and reframe the spaces we often pass through without a second glance. I’m drawn to urban environments not just for their structures, but for their symbolism: boarded-up windows, patched brickwork, reflective shopfronts that blur present and past. These images hold memory, history, tension — and sometimes, resistance.
Through a lens shaped by the influence of photographers like Phyllis Nicklin, Lee Friedlander, and David Gibson, I aim to create work that both documents and disorients. My focus is often on gentrification, doorways as thresholds, and reflections as layered time capsules. My images are part observation, part interrogation — visual studies of what is lost, what’s being overwritten, and what is deliberately obscured in modern cityscapes.
A recurring theme in my work is the presence of borders, fences, and physical barriers — elements that divide, protect, isolate, or deny access. This approach has been inspired in part by the paintings of Hurvin Anderson, whose use of layered boundaries speaks powerfully to themes of place and identity. While Anderson explores the complexities of race and memory, my own use of borders serves a different but parallel purpose — to examine urban exclusion, regeneration, and the shifting dynamics of class, ownership, and belonging within public and private space.
My mission is to slow down the act of looking. To guide viewers into spaces they thought they knew — until they saw them again, differently. I believe in the power of visual language to hold local history, collective memory, and fleeting poetry, and to open conversation about the transformation of place and identity in the cities we live in.
Each frame is a small act of resistance. A way of saying: this mattered. This was here. Look again.
Chloe, Her Practice, and Her Influences
Chloe, Her Practice, and Her Influences
Chloe Nicholls works primarily with photography, but her creative practice spans drawing, printmaking, watercolour, and mixed media. Her approach is intuitive and layered — grounded in close observation, material exploration, and a fascination with visual rhythm.
Her photographic style has been shaped by the work of Phyllis Nicklin, Lee Friedlander, and David Gibson, whose influence can be felt in her use of reflection, composition, and visual tension. From Nicklin, she draws a documentary sensitivity to place and transformation; from Friedlander, a fascination with framing and mirrored space; and from Gibson, a sense of timing and choreography within street photography. These artists have helped define Chloe’s focus on the poetic within the everyday — and the layered nature of urban storytelling.
Physical barriers — fences, railings, windows, hoardings — appear frequently in Chloe’s work. Inspired in part by artists like Hurvin Anderson, she uses these visual obstructions not only as formal devices, but as quiet commentaries on gentrification, exclusion, and access. In Chloe’s practice, these motifs speak to the structures that divide and reshape city life — and the lived realities beneath them.
Outside of photography, Chloe’s artistic practice explores natural forms, patterns, and still life elements. She often works in series — sketching leaves, bark, petals, or architectural fragments in watercolour and ink. These motifs are sometimes layered over photographs, creating mixed media works that blur the boundaries between structure and softness, digital and handmade, the built and the organic.
Artists like Basquiat, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, and Friedensreich Hundertwasser also inform Chloe’s visual language — influencing her interest in symbolism, bold mark-making, and the emotional resonance of repetition. Their work has encouraged her to trust instinct, embrace contradiction, and value imperfection as part of the process.
Ultimately, Chloe’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in noticing — whether through the lens, the brush, or the printed page. It’s about holding space for what’s nearly invisible, and creating visual records of the slow shifts in our shared environments.