Michelle Sank was born in South Africa and settled in the UK in 1987. She cites this background as informing her interest in sub-cultures and the exploration of contemporary social issues and challenges. Her crafted portraits meld place and person creating sociological, visual and psychological landscapes and narratives.
Growing up during Apartheid in an immigrant community, Sank has empathy with the experience of a community from the peripheries. Praised by her mentor David Goldblatt for finding the sensational in the everyday, her gaze is highly inquisitive and non-judgemental seeking to empower her subjects through their experience of the sitting process.
Michelle Sank is represented by Elliott Gallery in Amsterdam, Netherlands: elliott.gallery
Her photographs have been exhibited and published extensively in the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. Her imagery is held in the permanent collections of Allan Servais, Brussells, Open Eye Gallery Archive, Liverpool, Societe Jersiaise and Guernsey Museum, Channel Islands, Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, RAMM, Exeter and The Museum of Youth Culture, UK.
She has undertaken continuous commissions and residencies for prominent galleries and magazines in Europe and the USA and her work has won awards in numerous prestigious competitions including the Taylor Wessing Prize and the British Journal of Photography. She was recently a winner in The Portrait of Britain 2020, The Photo Review international competition, and is a recipient of the Rapid Response
Fund, The Contemporary Arts Society for purchase of work from the series “Breathe” that she made during Covid for exhibition at The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. She has recently been awarded a Fellowship with Distinction from The Royal Photographic Society.