Phoenix Women

…The photograph features 32 notable and everyday women from Bradford, including local councillors, an MP, the first female leader of Bradford Council, a midwife, a bus driver, a police officer, sports stars, and business leaders. Mendelsohn structures this massive group through a complex, multi-layered composition. Instead of a flat lineup, she utilises varying heights, postures, and overlapping physical frames to guide the viewer's eye smoothly across the frame, balancing individual identities with unified, collective strength.

This technical precision deliberately highlights a poignant historical irony. The working-class women in the original 1918 canteen, newly brought into the workforce to manufacture shells while men fought in the trenches, would have been legally barred from voting due to the strict age and property requirements of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Mendelsohn’s portrait rectifies this historical erasure. By using a wide-angle lens with controlled depth of field, she keeps all 32 subjects sharply in focus. This lack of a singular visual hierarchy ensures that the bus driver and the MP are granted equal optical weight, transforming a historical archive into a vibrant, democratic testament to modern self-determination.

Phoenix Women – 100 Years On revisits a photographically significant moment in Bradford’s history through a contemporary lens. The project reimagines Flora Lions’ 1918 painting Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works, commissioned by the Ministry of Information during the First World War. The original painting depicted women working in the canteen of the Phoenix munitions factory, capturing their contribution to the war effort at a time when women were taking on roles traditionally occupied by men.

One hundred years later, photographer and artist Carolyn Mendelsohn was commissioned by Art Works Creative Communities to create a contemporary response to Lions’ painting. Bringing together 32 women from Bradford, Mendelsohn reconstructed the group portrait as a reflection of contemporary society. The participants represent a broad cross-section of the city, including business leaders, councillors and an MP, as well as women working as nurses, bus drivers, police officers and in other essential roles. The result is both a portrait of Bradford and a visual statement about the changing position of women over the course of a century.

The project was conceived as a participatory arts initiative, making the women themselves central to the work. Rather than simply reproducing the historical image, Mendelsohn’s photograph brings the past into conversation with the present, celebrating the diversity, achievements and everyday contributions of contemporary women. For Mendelsohn, this distinction was important: the photograph was not only about her as the photographer, but about giving the women in front of her a platform and allowing their faces to be seen. The resulting image was selected as a winner of the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain in 2019 and subsequently appeared on JCDecaux digital screens across the UK alongside the other winning portraits.

Mendelsohn is a UK-based artist, portrait photographer and filmmaker whose practice is grounded in social research, visual narrative and collaboration. Her portraits seek to amplify quieter voices and are often developed through a close relationship between photographer and subject. This approach extends across her wider practice, from her acclaimed series Being Inbetween, which explores the complex transition between childhood and adolescence through portraits of girls aged 10–12, to Hardy and Free, which brought women into landscapes that held personal significance for them. Mendelsohn is also the founder of Through Our Lens, a photography and mentoring programme designed to help people tell their own stories through the medium.

The strength of Phoenix Women – 100 Years On lies in its ability to hold two moments in history within a single image. Lions’ original work documented women’s contribution to Britain during wartime; Mendelsohn’s contemporary portrait asks what that contribution looks like a century later. The photograph acknowledges the progress that has been made while keeping the historical image, and the women it represented, firmly in view. Through this act of reinterpretation, Mendelsohn turns a historical record into a living portrait of contemporary Bradford, connecting memory, place and collective identity through photography.