Polly Alderton is a British photographer. She studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Central Saint Martins in London, where she shot roll after roll of film without yet thinking of it as her practice.
Her main body of work is The Family Album, a long record of her own family of six and of the moments that fall between the usual milestone pictures. She works under the idea “Show Don’t Tell” and is interested in class in the UK. In 2019 she received the Firstsite Project Bursary for her project Burning House, and in 2021 Setanta Books published her zine 009 - Polly Alderton. Her pictures also appear in the book EyeMama (2023).
Alongside her personal work she is a stills photographer for the BBC, including on Climate Change: The Facts with David Attenborough. Her photographs have been published in The Sunday Times, The Observer, i-D and the British Journal of Photography. She sees her personal pictures “as stills in a longer film.”
