Edited By : Jude Jones
Francesca Di Stefano may be only twenty-two, but her work carries the gravity of an artist far beyond her years. In her graduate project Of Flesh and Form (January–May), the Prestwich-born photographer turns her lens toward the body - not as surface or spectacle, but as a living archive of memory, movement, and meaning.
“I’ve always been drawn to the body,” Di Stefano explains, “not just how it looks, but how it feels, moves, holds memory.” This sensibility runs through her work like a pulse. The project resists the reduction of the body to mere surface, instead seeking its textures of meaning: the bends and stretches, the weight and release, the silent negotiations between tension and rest.
Every pose, she insists, is a kind of language - every stillness a statement.
What emerges is not simply a collection of portraits, but a meditation on form itself. Di Stefano frames the body as structure and softness, geometry and vulnerability. Flesh becomes more than substance; it becomes narrative. In her images, the body is revealed as a site of memory and gesture, as a vessel for the unspoken.
Working with a cast of collaborators - including models Kene’h Oweh, Mariana Patricío Da Costa, Isabel Cook, Grace Lee, Holly Chaisty, Lily Mae White, and Eilish Distefano, with make-up artistry by Niamh Fox and Immy Alexandra, and assistance from Becca Mullan and Franco Royal, Di Stefano builds an ensemble of forms that speak together in quiet harmony. Each sitter’s presence is honoured not as object, but as collaborator, contributing to a shared choreography of image and meaning.
There is intimacy in these photographs, but it is not spectacle - it is attentiveness. Di Stefano is interested in the in-between: the moments before a pose settles, the breath that shifts a line, the soft collapse after exertion. These micro-narratives of the body create a visual language that feels both ancient and immediate, reminding us that form itself is alive with memory.
As she builds her portfolio, Di Stefano continues to cultivate collaborations with artists, musicians, and creative communities across the North. Her passion for portraiture and editorial photography is driven by a desire not only to depict but to reveal - the essence of her subjects, the subtle stories etched into their faces and gestures. Each project is, in her words, “a chance to create visually stunning images that resonate with emotion and authenticity.”
Of Flesh and Form is not simply a graduate project, but a statement of intent. It situates Di Stefano within a lineage of artists who treat the body as both subject and medium, as form and as feeling. In her photographs, presence becomes an act of resistance, a quiet declaration of being seen - in motion, in stillness, in the vulnerable eloquence of flesh.
