Founder and Director Vanessa Miles
Vanessa has been working in photography all of her adult life. She also had an early passion for the environment which led her to work as a photographer on a Greenpeace ship and then to set up the UK’s first independent picture agency (1989) specialising in environmental issues. This supplied photographs to the national press and beyond. She has been a film stills photographer, a picture editor and researcher, a press and events photographer and teacher. Although her photography career has been varied: her passion for the environment has remained throughout. She covered many environmental stories for Greenpeace and worked as their photography for Glastonbury for five years.
MA and research
In 2015 she embarked on an MA in Photography exploring how to engage people with the environment in a positive way after many years producing images showing environmental damage. This led her to a shift in her mindset. Part of her MA work was following a group of swimmers on the River Dart in Devon for which she produced a short film using stills and moving image. She also produce films for Woodland Trust and one on transport for Transition Exeter.
Around this time she returned to Blackpool, 26 years after photographing sewage on beaches. She produced a set of up to date images, published in The Guardian, using before and after sliders, which had the highest social engagement for The Guardian on that day (16th Oct 2016).
Natural World
“My love of the natural world and interest in positive environmental images helped me with my own mental health coping with a rare health condition. It also helped when the pandemic came along. This, along with my experience as a teacher of photography, particularly with people with special needs and high anxiety, led me to set up Well Image. Most inspiring, was one particular person who suffered from agoraphobia, the camera helped her to take steps to venture outdoors into the natural world one step at a time”.
Well Image
Well Image was set up at the end of 2020 as a response to the pandemic. Vanessa is responsible for the day to day running of the organisation.
Over the course of 2022, Well Image ran workshops in collaboration with Devon Recovery Learning Community, funded by the National Lottery for anyone self diagnosing with poor mental health. Many of our courses are run online and include tasks to do outdoors between sessions. New opportunities are made for social connection for some of our most isolated people. We have discovered our courses are particularly beneficial for those who have the least access to their communities. They are people who have a long term health condition, disability and/or anxiety.
Well Image has also worked in collaboration with Active Devon, Age UK Devon, Living Options, Torbay Community Development Trust, Torbay and South Devon NHS Trust.
Our aims are closely linked with the NHS 5 ways to wellbeing. There is evidence to show how powerful photography can be as a rehabilitation tool: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17533015.2022.2107033