Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Documentary / Reportage »

Malleable Souls follows Carrick and his friends through their final year of high school on Cumbrae, an island of around 1,300 people in the Firth of Clyde, off the west coast of Scotland. Each morning they take the fifteen-minute ferry to Largs on the mainland for class. By autumn, the group will scatter — some to universities in Glasgow or further south, some to apprenticeships, some staying on the island, some still deciding.

I have been returning to the island across six visits since the summer of 2025. The portraits are made slowly, usually after long stretches of doing nothing in particular together — waiting for the ferry, walking the shoreline, sitting in their bedrooms in the long Scottish dusk.

Cumbrae's population has fallen in every census since 2001, part of a wider demographic decline across the islands of Scotland's west coast. What this means for a seventeen-year-old is concrete: the question of whether to leave is not abstract. The work sits with this group at the moment those decisions begin to materialize — when the future stops being something to imagine and becomes something to choose.