Elmwood: Pictures from Dartmoor is a series of large-format colour photographs made in Dartmoor National Park, Southwest England, towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nicholas grew up on Canford Heath, Dorset, on one of the largest housing estates in Europe.
Each year, his family would escape the enclosure of the estate and head to Dartmoor to holiday with Nicholas’s grandparents at their home, Elmwood. When his father’s business collapsed, the family was forced to relocate. Hopscotching between communities and occasionally living apart, Elmwood remained. It became the confluence of family life and an embodiment of belonging and home throughout prolonged instability. Elmwood was eventually sold, but the landscapes of home remained, as did the habit of returning to them.
Nicholas eventually relocated to Dartmoor.
Elmwood: Pictures from Dartmoor is the result of that return. Made across multiple seasons, the photographs follow paths walked since childhood—over hopped fences, along river valleys, and up to the granite tors of the high moor. These are pictures made slowly, at the edges of the day, in morning mist and the half-glow of dusk. The large-format process demands patience and deliberateness, a way of seeing that complements a project rooted in memory and attention.
The work sits at the intersection of landscape and autobiography. It is about connection, loss, familiarity, and surprise. These are photographs about what it means to belong somewhere, about the paths we keep walking, the meaning of home, and the persistent power of memories that make us belong.
Although the work began as an ode to returning, it simultaneously became a slow farewell. In 2024, Nicholas relocated his home and studio to the Northwest Highlands of Scotland.
Selected photographs from Elmwood were shown alongside the work of Garry Fabian Miller in his survey exhibition Adore at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 2023, and were later exhibited at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum as part of the group exhibition Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape in 2024–2025.
About Nicholas J.R. White
Nicholas J.R. White (b. 1989) is a photographer currently based on the Isle of Skye, in the north-west Highlands of Scotland.
After graduating from Arts University Plymouth in 2013, White was awarded places on two consecutive Magnum Photos Professional Practice courses in 2014. He is a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Environmental Bursary (2017) and the IMA Landscape Prize with Todd Hido (2020), and is currently an Ampersand Foundation and Photoworks Fellow.
In 2025, he was awarded the Sankey Photography Archive Grant with Signal Film and Media, placing him in Barrow-in-Furness, the English town where Britain’s nuclear submarines are built. This work laid the foundations for his current long-term project, which examines the interconnected narratives of faith and nuclear deterrence and is scheduled to be exhibited across the UK in 2027.
White has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, which holds his work in its permanent collection. In addition to his personal practice, he undertakes selected assignments for The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times, Noema, and many others.
When not working as a photographer, White is a commercially endorsed skipper, operating whale-watching boats in the Western Isles. [Official Website]
