Aisha’s Lens: Capturing Memory, Warmth, and Truth on Film.

At just 20 years old, Aisha speaks with a calm conviction that makes her vision instantly clear. Born in Australia and raised between the East Midlands and London, she grew up navigating the dislocation of moving often and the reality of being a Black girl in predominantly white areas. Family became her grounding force, with her mother, siblings, and cousins forming the circle that held her steady as she shifted from school to school. Alongside them, cinema and photography became anchors of a different kind, shaping how she looked at the world and eventually, how she chose to capture it.

Her medium of choice is film, an art form many dismissed as outdated but which has found resurgence among young photographers, particularly within diasporic and creative communities who see in it a way to tell their stories with warmth and depth. “All the family albums I grew up with had that warmth,” Aisha says. “Film captures life in a way that feels nostalgic and real. It’s difficult, it’s expensive, but it’s never something I’ll give up.”

Her introduction to the craft was intimate. At twelve, her mother passed down a Canon camera, an heirloom that carried the weight of memory. “She told me to just use digital like everyone else, but I couldn’t let go of the way film looked. It was beautiful, the way it captured everything.” That first roll of film began with a picture of her cat, which came out completely underexposed. Rather than discouraging her, the mistake ignited a curiosity that led her to YouTube tutorials, library books, and later, experiments in her bedroom, where she transformed the space into a makeshift darkroom during lockdown. “My sisters would come in like, 'What’s that smell?' I was there with all these chemicals and a red LED light, pretending I was a scientist.”

For Aisha, film is about intention. Every frame is finite, every mistake costly, and yet that very limitation gives her images their power. She describes herself as the photographer of her friendship group and the one who catches moments when no one is looking. “I want my pictures to feel like memories,” she explains. “When people look back, I want them to close their eyes and feel that day again.”

It’s an approach rooted not only in aesthetics but also in resistance. In a creative landscape where Black photographers, particularly women, are often undervalued or undermined, her insistence on film becomes a statement. She recalls experiences at photo walks where male photographers questioned her technical ability, or industry encounters where brands expected free labour, uncredited work, and unquestioning compliance. “Do I look like I’ve got dickhead written across my forehead?” she says with a laugh, though the frustration is unmistakable. Over time, these experiences hardened her resolve: she will no longer work without fair pay or recognition. “I know my worth, I know my talent. If you’re not going to pay for it, bye.”

That sense of self-worth extends to the narratives she wants to shape. Too often, she argues, Africa has been flattened into tired stereotypes like the slum, the war-torn landscape, the colonial tragedy. Aisha dreams of returning to Kenya, her family’s home, to photograph the people and places that shaped her mother’s life. She imagines portraits of her grandmother, her teacher, the vibrancy of the villages and the beaches, all images free of pity and artifice. “I don’t want to photograph poverty just for aesthetics,” she says firmly. “I want to show the beauty of home, the people who make it, the life that’s there.”

Her ambitions stretch into cinema as well. She has already drafted scripts and created short films, though none she plans to release publicly just yet. The goal is to bring the sensibility of her photography, its intimacy and its reverence for memory into moving images that challenge how Africa and the diaspora are seen on screen. “We don’t have enough positive African cinema,” she says. “It’s always some immigrant struggle story, or a war-torn country. I want people to see home as normal, with people who have normal feelings.”

Aisha speaks often of light, both literal and metaphorical. In her photography, she is drawn to sunlight on skin, golden hour glows, and the gentle warmth of faces half-turned toward the camera. In her vision for the future, she is equally determined to shed light on truths overlooked or misrepresented. She looks up to Senegalese directors of the 1970s and 80s who once brought a new kind of African cinema to the world, lamenting how little has continued since. For her, photography and film are not just creative pursuits but acts of reclamation.

“People say put the phone down, live in the moment,” she says. “But it’s just as important to capture memories. I hope when people look at my photos, they think, I want to take pictures of my friends like that, or my surroundings like that.”

For Aisha, every photograph is both archive and invitation: a way of remembering, and a call for others to look more closely at the beauty already around them. In her hands, film becomes more than nostalgia. It becomes a language of truth, a way to see the world and ourselves, without filters of distortion or pity. And at just 20, she’s only beginning to show us what she sees.