Make Yourself at Home:
Stories from Bradford

Make Yourself at Home is a landmark exhibition for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, weaving together newly commissioned photography and rich archival material to present a vibrant portrait of life in Bradford.

Led by New Focus: Bradford Young Curators, this exhibition is the culmination of 18 months of collaboration, mentorship, research, and community engagement. Working in close partnership with the team at Impressions, the Young Curators have been involved in every stage of the process: from selecting artists and shaping themes, to working directly with local communities and cultural organisations. Together, they have crafted an exhibition that reconciles personal experience with collective memory and celebrates identity, belonging, and what it means to call a place home.

Central to the exhibition are five new photography commissions  offering a portrait of contemporary Bradford. These include three Bradford-based photographers, Laura Mate, Nathan McGill and Karol Wyszynski, and two national photographers, Anselm Ebulue and Tori Ferenc. The artists bring diverse perspectives shaped by their own backgrounds, practices and connections to the city. Some are born-and-bred Bradfordians, others are artists whose work centres on migration, memory, and the rituals of everyday life. 

Through their photography, the artists explore themes of kinship, heritage, identity and belonging. They capture both quiet domestic moments and joyous social gatherings that make up the fabric of family life in all its forms, both the families we are born to and the families we choose. 

Complementing the commissions is Bradford Family Album, an extensive community-sourced archive of family photographs. Built through months of dedicated community outreach, the archive brings together personal photographs from households, families, and community hubs across the city. The Young Curators have digitised hundreds of images, offering an authentic view of Bradford as seen and lived through the eyes of its residents. 

From wide-lapelled 1970s wedding celebrations to garage-smoked Latvian meats, the photographs capture personal milestones, cultural traditions, and everyday moments of connection. Each image contributes to a living archive, a collective record of how people have preserved heritage, adapted customs, and shaped new ones in the process of making Bradford their home. 

These two strands of the project come together in the exhibition to reveal how personal histories inform our present and shape our sense of belonging. Make Yourself at Home is a celebration of lives and legacies passed on. It stands as a testament to the power of Bradford’s people to shape identity, preserve culture, and create a home. 

Curated and Produced by Impressions Gallery and New Focus: Bradford Young Curators. Commissioned by Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.