Born 1955 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Nudrat Afza is a self-taught social-documentary photographer who lives and works in Bradford. For over 30 years, Nudrat has documenting the everyday lives of people from diverse communities. Nudrat, during this time, was a full-time carer for her daughter, who had a serious liver disorder and died in 2024. This limited her income and made her dependent on grants and commissions to support her professional work as a photographer.
Nudrat came to Britain in 1964, but her professional career as a photographer began in 1986 when she received a grant from Yorkshire Arts to document the Bangladeshi community in Bradford.
Talking to Yorkshire Artscene in 1989, she said:
I have always been interested in photography, but it was only in 1986 when I left social work that I began to take photographs myself. I started by photographing the people and places in Bradford where I was brought up and now live.
I try to build relationships with the people in my photographs, and be sensitive rather than intrusive. My aim is to concentrate on very simple but strong and positive images, because I feel that Black people have already had enough negative exposure.
She was invited in 1989 to be Photographer in Residence at Huddersfield Art Gallery and worked on an exhibition, shown in 1990, of the history of South Asian communities in Kirklees. During the same period she did a number of commissions in other towns in the North of England.
Since that time Nudrat has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections. In 1992 she worked on a collaborative project with artist, Professor Conrad Atkinson, on the ‘Zones of Gold: for Emily’ exhibition at Cartwright Hall, Bradford.
In 1996, Nudrat was commissioned to produce a set of ten photographs of Cartwright Hall; and at the turn of the new century she was selected to take part in the ‘Year of the Artist’ project.
Her social documentary exhibition, ‘One Hundred Years of Cheetham and Broughton’, was shown at the Jewish Museum, Manchester in 2001.
During 2012, Nudrat took a series of photographs of the Kenmore Hair Salon on Toller Lane, Bradford, in the final months before the owner retired after spending his entire working life there. The photographs, titled ‘The Salon’, were exhibited at the University of Bradford (see example image below).
From 2015 onward, Nudrat has photographed female fans and supporters of Bradford Football Club (see examples below). The photographs have also been displayed in solo exhibitions at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and at Bradford Cathedral and in 2016, a ‘City Girls’, calendar of images from the first stage of the project was published.
Other recent projects have included photographing pigeon fanciers in Sheffield, the treatment of a cancer patient (Nudrat’s sister), as well as photographing derelict buildings in Bradford, and recording the diminishing numbers of Jewish faith people in Bradford at their synagogue. The collection of photographs from the latter project, titled ‘Kehillah’ (Hebrew: congregation/community) has been shown at Salts Mill, Saltaire in 2019, and at Cartwright Hall, Bradford in 2020.
In 2024 Nudrat’s work was chosen to feature in the book ‘Shining Lights’, illustrating the work of 57 Black female photographers active during the 1980s and 90s.
In 2025 Nudrat published the Bradford Synagogue photographs in her book ‘Kehillah’, published by Dewi Lewis, and Nudrat’s work with the Bradford Jewish community has also been the focus of local and national media attention, most recently (2025) in The Guardian was shown in a solo exhibition at the Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax, during August – January, 2025/2026.
Image from ‘Kehillah’.
Contact: Nudrat Afza