BILLY ALLEN - ALICE POYZER

The Koppel Project presents an exhibition bringing together the work of Billy Allen and Alice Poyzer, two photographers whose practices intersect through a shared dedication to constructed black-and-white imagery. Working across portraiture and still life, both artists build immersive visual worlds that blur documentation and invention, using photography as a means of staging psychological, material, and emotional landscapes.

Alice Poyzer presents works from Other Joys, a deeply personal series that explores the intensity and intricacy of her special interests as an autistic woman. Her distinct, flash-drenched monochromatic images invite viewers into intimate, carefully composed scenes that exist between playfulness and unease. Through self-portraiture and post-documentary strategies, Poyzer resists linear narrative, instead offering fragments of experience shaped by sensation—warmth, euphoria, and fixation. The work functions both as a communicative gesture and a process of self-understanding, reflecting on themes of masking, routine, and the ongoing need for nuanced representation of autistic women. In reclaiming difference as a site of strength, Poyzer transforms photography into a tool of liberation and self-acceptance. Her work has been widely recognised, with accolades including the Belfast Photo Festival (winner, 2026), Vogue’s Women by Women Vision Grant (recipient, 2025), and the British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus (series winner, 2025), as well as her photographic practice being recognised at Paris Photo 2024, where she was awarded the Carte Blanche Award.

Billy Allen’s practice similarly embraces construction through a materially driven and collaborative approach. Drawing on a background in construction and an inherited interest in material processes, Allen operates as a visual constructor, assembling sculptural environments using unconventional materials, props, and stylised figures. His images are layered with references to fashion and noir aesthetics, often exploring the theatricality of gender through masquerade. A recurring strategy within his work is the fragmentation of the body, where limbs, gestures, and partial forms are isolated and reconfigured. This disruption of coherence invites new readings of identity and desire. Central to his approach is a pursuit of beauty within the absurd, where exaggerated forms and unlikely combinations become sites of elegance and tension. His tableaux balance humour, darkness, and sensuality, transforming everyday objects—such as hair, chairs, and footwear—into charged visual symbols that destabilise the familiar. Allen’s work embodies an uneasy atmosphere and emotional response, and this distinctive approach was recognised in 2025 with the Photo London x Hahnemühle Award.

Together, Allen and Poyzer demonstrate the potential of constructed photography to articulate interior worlds. While Poyzer’s practice is rooted in introspection and lived neurodivergent experience, Allen’s work extends outward into collaborative, materially rich fiction. Both, however, share a fascination with transformation—of self, of space, and of the photographic image itself.

BILLY ALLEN
Billy Allen is a British photographer whose constructed imagery explores gender, femininity, and theatrical staging through a noir-inflected visual language. Drawing on a background in construction, their practice combines sculptural environments, fashion-based imagery, and carefully composed scenes that move between humour, darkness, and elegance. A recent graduate of the BA Photography course at University of the West of England, they were awarded the Photo London Student Award in 2025, and their work was subsequently featured in The Guardian.

ALICE POYZER
Alice Poyzer is a British photographer working across post-documentary and constructed imagery. In 2024 her series ‘Other Joys’ won Paris Photo’s Carte Blanche award, and the following year won BJP’s Female in Focus. Poyzer holds a Master’s in Photography and was the first Artist-in-Residence at the Paul Smith Foundation. Most recently, she received Vogue’s Women by Women Vision Grant, resulting in her series showing in Milan at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in March of 2026.

LUCID
Lucid is a Canson Infinity certified London-based fine art printmaking studio working at the intersection of precision and artistic collaboration. Media and substrate are not neutral decisions: founder Denise N Ebanks selects each in relation to the image, for what the surface asks of the viewer and the physicality it gives the work. Lucid prints in Piezography® Pro K5, a black and white digital carbon pigment system that deploys up to nine black inks simultaneously, producing split toned prints with the nuance, body and tonality of a fine darkroom print. For this exhibition, Denise worked closely with both artists to produce new prints on Canson Infinity papers.