BitterSweet reviews... Inside
Inside: A photo book by Mia Evans
This is incredibly raw work. Inside is an exploration of the self by Mia Evans through photographic practice. Although her body and experiences are at the heart of the collection, she interrogates selfhood itself through the work. She describes herself as “a Neurodivergent, Mentally ill, Queer, Transsexual Woman” and each of these facets of her identity is explored. Annie Bell provides an introduction and Izabelle Pullin contributes a critical essay, ‘Through a Lens of Trans Divinity’.
Her previous work focussed on London’s rave culture, recording the otherwise transient, but here Mia turns the camera quite literally on herself. From 2020 to 2025, Mia documents her body, her face; this is much more complicated and complex that a straightforward, linear documentation of transition. There are discrete series of photographs here, such as As I Change I Die, And As I Die, I Grow (2024), which questions the changeable and often contradictory nature of identity. There are also dozens of self-portraits, many casual, some carefully composed, which feel honest without being scandalous or wantonly provocative.
Mugged by a penis, Robbed of my sanity (2025) is a brutal documentation of the aftermath of sexual assault. Short texts punctuate a range of images: self-portraits, mixed media artworks, performance documentation. In quick succession, they accumulate an astonishing power: difficult to look at but more difficult to look away. Art offers a medium for processing trauma; shared with the world, it offer catharsis, however fleeting, often unresolved.
Deleting Instagram (2025) professes to be about the expulsion of waste and depicts, plainly, shit being flushed down the toilet. I can’t pretend to like these particular works, which feel less original and out of place in an otherwise thoughtful collection, but I understand their inclusion: to include the taboo, to mention the unmentionable. A scan of her asshole decorates the front cover: there’s nothing she won’t share; nothing secret, not anymore.
Inside is self-published; it’s certainly raw in its form: documentation feels like a compulsion for Mia, a making sense of the world, a making visible of the self. The book is, as an object, slightly rough around the edges. Details are lost in the gutter: Mia told me to break the spine of the book to make everything visible. One double spread has Mia caught between the two pages; it’s an accidental but additional layer to the image, where one has to seek out the subject. It’s a tactile object, but not a precious one. It’s also consciously affordable: accessible, so as to be as widely shared as possible.
This isn’t an easy book to process, but it is brutally honest, highly affecting, and vitally necessary. I’m excited to see what she will turn her eye to next.
Inside is available to buy online.
— Louis Shankar