Claire Newman-Williams is a British photographic artist who uses photography and collage to explore the world where imagination and reality collide. By blending her unique photographs with text, diagrams, and inscriptions that other generations have left behind, she builds visual stories of recalled experience and nostalgia.

In her Story Box series she combines original photographic images (often portraits that she creates with old cameras and alternative processes) with found objects, to create collages layered and arranged in antique wooden boxes. These Story Boxes are intended to be like inner landscapes, addressing the recurrent themes of the smothering of identity and our fear of being seen - truly seen by those around us.

She sources the boxes themselves from auctions and house clearances and the contents of the box are the ephemera of everyday life, the junk that others throw away: old book covers, flakes of old textured paint, strips of leather, old nails, snippets of newspaper from years past. Vintage glass slide casings often cover the photographic portraits giving the viewer the impression that they are being looked at from behind a window. The viewer becomes the viewed.