The Self-Taught Visual Artist Casting Shadows From Memory

Gabriel Moses makes pictures that feel like memory, heavy, slow, and alive. The 26-year-old London-born photographer and filmmaker has built a body of work defined by light, shadow, and control, creating visuals that invite you to linger. 

His subjects’ faces don’t glow; they emerge from the shadows of memory, as if pulled from something half-remembered. In that darkness, the work sits between ritual and dream, capturing Black life with reverence and surreal poise.

Born in South London to Nigerian parents, Moses learned by doing. No art school. No gatekeepers. Just curiosity and instinct. He started out filming his friends playing football before Nike called when he was eighteen.

Since then, he’s shot for Dazed, Dior, Burberry, Supreme, Louis Vuitton, and Apple, all while keeping his visual language intact. He’s part of that new South London generation — Slawn, Samuel Ross, Mowalola — who never waited for permission.

You can recognize a Moses image instantly. The tone is deep and rich. The light feels devotional. Every frame carries a sense of ceremony: a mother holding a prosthetic belly in Regina, four women standing like saints in Selah, Skepta glowing like he’s between sermon and stage.

You can trace Nick Knight in the precision and Malick Sidibé in the warmth, but the rhythm is his own.

He talks about wanting to “bottle memory.” His images do just that, collecting pieces of his life and turning them cinematic. His mother’s flower arranging, his sister’s fashion posters, Sunday school palettes, all refracted through shadow. Darkness isn’t background in his work; it’s narrative. It holds faith, family, and inheritance.

What makes Moses stand out isn’t scale or access. It’s control. His lighting carries the calm of classical portraiture but never feels staged. His frames glow from within. His surrealism feels human, not heightened, Black life rendered with the same quiet mythos usually reserved for saints and icons.

He doesn’t chase shock or perfection. His work moves slower. It pulls you in, then holds you there. In a world obsessed with clarity and brightness, he builds through the blur, those parts of identity that can’t be explained, only felt.

That’s the point. To show that Blackness can be both myth and memory. That fashion can hold soul. That art doesn’t need permission to feel eternal.

Gabriel Moses doesn’t capture moments. He builds them, piece by piece, shadow by shadow, until they start to feel like memory.