Meet the Talents: Ewan Power

The Sigma Talent Awards programme continues by spotlighting another of this year’s selected photographers, Ewan Power, an emerging Irish visual artist working primarily with analogue photography, whose work feels both intensely personal and quietly expansive. Ewan’s images often read like entries in a visual diary — his approach dismantles boundaries between the public and the private, allowing vulnerability, queerness, and lived experience to take centre stage.

A PRACTICE ROOTED IN LOSS AND CONNECTION

Ewan’s journey into this phase of his work is shaped by the sudden death of his father. Photography became a way of grounding himself, a tool for articulating the unspoken textures of grief when words felt insufficient. His statement describes this period as one “shrouded in mourning,” where nature, community, and queer identity intertwined into a new emotional landscape. Through diaristic photographs, Ewan explores how absence permeates familiar spaces, and how documenting life in its smallest details can become an act of remembrance.

Ewan’s journey into this phase of his work is one ‘shrouded in mourning’, where nature, community, and queer identity are intertwined into a new emotional landscape.

IMAGES THAT MOVE LIKE TIDES

Across his images, we see a practice shaped by fluidity — a swimmer cutting through open water, two figures illuminated in the soft neon of a bedroom at night, or the restless surface of the sea stretching outward. These images move between intimacy and solitude, joy and ache, presence and absence. Ewan is drawn to how grief arrives in waves, how it can overwhelm and recede, how it transforms one’s sense of self and belonging. Yet what emerges from his photographs is not only mourning — but also warmth, friendship, and the quiet resilience of community.

Ewan is drawn to how grief arrives in waves, how it can overwhelm and recede, how it transforms one’s sense of self and belonging.

CRAFT, CARE AND CURIOSITY

Although diaristic, Ewan’s work is far from casual. His dedication to analogue photography — with all its unpredictability and tactile nuance — allows him to embrace imperfection as part of the emotional truth of the image. He approaches each frame not as a fixed record, but as a living imprint of a moment felt. This attention to craft strengthens the emotional clarity of his work, enabling him to shape images that feel both spontaneous and intentional.

A VOICE EMERGING THROUGH HONESTY

What makes Ewan’s practice so compelling is the openness with which he works. They invite viewers into a shared emotional space — one that acknowledges uncertainty, yet makes room for beauty, connection, and light. Photography, for Ewan, is not simply a medium of documentation. It is a way of being with the world — of embracing its imperfections, of honouring the people and gestures that anchor us.