Carolyn Mendelsohn

Photography was the farthest thing from Carolyn Mendelsohn's mind when she began her working life. Today, she is one of the UK's leading portrait photographers, with an impressive list of awards and clients. Keith Wilson hears how the once reluctant photographer became obsessed with telling stories with her camera...

Carolyn Mendelsohn Profile

Carolyn Mendelsohn originally trained and worked as an actor and film-maker, before becoming a professional portrait photographer in 2008.

In 2016, she won the Royal Photographic Society's International Photography Exhibition gold medal for her portrait Alice aged 10, from the series Being Inbetween.

This portrait was taken as part of her acclaimed project, Being Inbetween, which was published as a book in 2021 by Bluecoat Press.

Her work has been exhibited across the UK and Europe, and published in international titles, including The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, Huffington Post and Le Monde.

Carolyn is a Nikon #Zcreator and is one of the first Ambassadors for the Royal Photographic Society. She lives in West Yorkshire.

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We don't always end up doing what we thought we were going to do in life. Take Carolyn Mendelsohn - she trained as an actor, and with a passion for theatre became a director. Explaining her transformation, she says: "I started to use film in performance and then started to get commissioned to make film." But even working with film didn't seamlessly lead to the love for the still image that enraptures her today.

In an indirect way, Carolyn blames that on her three children. She continues: "I have three kids; Oscar is the oldest, and I would take him as a baby to the editing suites in W London, and it wasn't ideal. It was when I had Poppy and Sam, I moved to a different place and thought, 'hang on a second, who am I?'." It was her husband who provided the answer: one day he gave her a Nikon D70 as a present, but even then, she kept it in the box under her bed.

Why were you so hesitant about it?