Shropshire snapper Stacey Hatfield is making a name for herself in the photographic industry, after being pinpointed as one of the UK’s brightest new talents. Ben Bentley reports.

She has worked on high fashion photo shoots for the likes of Top Shop and alongside such photographic luminaries as celebrity snapper Harry Borden who has committed to film the likes of Bjork, Bono, Robbie Williams and Tony Blair.

At just 22 years old, Stacey Hatfield from the south Shropshire village of Diddlebury has been named one of the most talented young photographers in the country.

Last summer she graduated from Cheltenham and Gloucester University with a First Class Honours degree in photography and in November was voted runner-up in the prestigious Nikon Discovery Awards – chiefly for her stunning but desolate documentary-style shots taken during a trip to the western reaches of Canada.

It sounds like a glamorous job, but don’t be fooled. For one portraiture project she lived in a tent in the dead of winter, waiting three months to get the perfect shot.

That was last January when she upped sticks and lived in a tepee commune in the heart of the south Wales countryside, recording dwellers’ stories in pictures.

“I worked with one lady for three months before she would let me take a picture of her,” says Stacey.

“But at one point I thought ‘What am I doing here?’” she says. “I questioned what I was doing because I was on my own in the freezing cold trying to keep my photographic equipment dry.

“My iPod had run out of battery power, my phone didn’t work. I was thinking ‘People don’t want me to be here – I can either go home or I can stick to it.’ I stuck to it.”

Such experiences, says Stacey, have made her more determined and a better photographer. The work she came back with was exhibited in a London studio to critical acclaim and her efforts were vindicated.

She says her rise to this pinnacle of her burgeoning career almost certainly began here in Shropshire when as a child she would sneak into her father’s darkroom and watch him make beautiful images magically appear on blank paper.

“I remember that when I was seven or eight going into my dad’s studio,” says Stacey. “He shot photographs on 5/4 film which is a larger format than 35mm and I was fascinated by it.

“My brother Tom and I would go into the dark room and wait for the pictures to develop in the tank. It was like, ‘Show me how it all works’.”

This was when the family was lived at High Ercall and Stacey was attending schools in Wellington. With her father a keen amateur photographer and her mother a talented artist in her own right, the children were encouraged to be creative. Tom, 25, is now a successful furniture maker living in London and studying at the Royal College of Arts.

Later Stacey studied a National Diploma in design at New College in Wellington and at the same time picked up a City and Guilds qualification in black and white photography.

She says: “I realised I wanted to do a degree in photography but I did not have a portfolio.

“So I went travelling to Australia and New Zealand for six months, living on different farms and taking pictures.”

The resultant porfolio is a series of stunning pictures entitled Encounters of Australia and New Zealand, images that proved to be her passport to study photography at Cheltenham and Gloucester University.

Inspiration for her work can come from anywhere, she says, but largely from people and their lives. As she says: “I shoot stories. My main thing is to create a visual story.

“Inspiration comes from anything that you can gain information from that you can apply to yourself and sprinkle on your own work.”

She also cites Shropshire itself as an inspiration, and once, “to show the movement and repetition of people in society”, she took a roll of wallpaper around the country, set it up as a backdrop and simply asked people to pose in front of it.

On two separate occasions she travelled for a month across remote locations in Canada taking portraits.

Photography is a lonely furrow in a hugely competitive field, but recognition through the Nikon awards is testament to her talents.

The awards process saw several thousand of the best graduate photographers from UK universities pitted against each another in a bid to unearth the best new snappers in the UK.

Through a series of displays and critiques, Stacey was shortlisted and eventually made it to the final.

And she admits that when it came to awards night she was apprehensive and actually wanted a friend and fellow student to win. Then she was announced as runner-up.

She explains: “I had never won anything like that before. I did not know what to feel, but it was fantastic.

“It has raised my profile and it’s a confidence boost because sometimes you think ‘Am I good? I am, aren’t I? Or am I?”

As well as working on some high profile photo shoots, Stacey has secured a number of commissions closer to home, including one for Shropshire’s Made in Ludlow, a company that creates handmade photograph albums.

She adds: “I’m doing something I love doing and I want to work in portrait photography but I have to continue to study and learn my trade.

“I’m brand new to it. I’ve only just started.”

Check out some of Stacey’s work on her website