About

Stop Look Listen is the CIC behind ‘Picnic - a place for photography’ that offers access to skills development, exhibiting platforms, work experience, mentoring and creative networks for emerging talent, young professionals, and amateur enthusiasts.   Our permanent space in St Leonard’s acts as a welcome place for the photo community to meet and hosts our photobook archive and a programme of photography-led events including exhibitions, talks, workshops, and critique sessions.

 

In 2023, we launched Moonshore, a weekend photography festival that introduced our work to a wider audience and attracted participation from several leading figures in contemporary art photography including Nick Waplington, Simon Roberts, Eva Voutsaki and Laura Pannack

 For the Moonshore in May 2025, our festival will showcase local and regional emerging talent alongside a weekend programme of talks, workshops and events on and around St Leonard’s foreshore. 

Reflecting its name, Picnic is a place in which the photography community and the local community can meet and contribute towards a shared interest in creativity and learning.

Meet the Team


  • Founder

    Nick Ballon is a documentary and portrait photographer, whose Anglo-Bolivian heritage is an important source of subject matter and inspiration in his work, exploring socio-historical ideas of identity and place, the concept of ‘foreignness’ and belonging.

    His work has been exhibited internationally including at Rencontres d’Arles, Beijing Triennial, Guernsey Photography Festival, KK Outlet, Wellcome Trust, and NCM/Foyle Foundation, and received an honourable mention for the Photographic Museum of Humanity grant.

    In 2013 he self-published his first book Ezekiel 36:36 which looked at the curious and precarious existence of Bolivia’s national airline, which received much critical acclaim and was one of TIME’s best photo-books of 2013.

    www.nickballon.com

  • Co-Director


    Joe is Picnic’s Librarian, as well as that his photographic work is centred around socio-anthropology, connections to place and the landscape.

  • Founder

    Alma Haser is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art.

    Expanding the dimensions of traditional portrait photography, Alma takes her photographs further by using inventive paper-folding techniques, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue around her subjects; manipulating her portraits into futuristic paper sculptures and blurring the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery.

    Alma has won many awards for her work, including Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award in 2013 for her Cosmic Surgery series (also the basis of a successful self-published book project). Her piece The Ventriloquist was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012.

    Her work has been exhibited worldwide and recent venues have included the 2017 Saatchi Gallery show From Selfie to Self-Expression. Examples of her work are currently on show at the Now Gallery in Greenwich, London.

    www.haser.org

  • Creative Co-Ordinator

FIND US HERE

 

Picnic is a non-profit organisation so we are always looking for new volunteers,

please contact us if your interested.

studio@pic-nic.uk