2025 Camping Asia: Find Your Eyes

/About the Performance/

Benji Reid's powerful MIF23 show returns to Manchester, mixing Afro-futurist imagery with hard-hitting tales from his life and adventures that unfold before your very eyes.

Combining photography, choreography and theatre to make striking and surreal images, Benji Reid is an artist like no other.

For MIF23, Benji drew from the well of his life experiences – exploring vulnerability, tragedy and triumph through the photographer’s lens. Now Find Your Eyes returns to Manchester after a string of international dates.

Find Your Eyes takes you behind the scenes, on an emotional rollercoaster where conflict meets beauty and the stage becomes Benji’s studio. Watch as he opens up on some of the most moving episodes of his life, and uses them to inspire his art.

The work draws on Benji’s career as both an award-winning photographer and a pioneer of Hip Hop Theatre – bringing dancers and photography together to create images live, in front of his audience.

Journeying through highs and lows, Find Your Eyes explores how we make sense of the world through our stories and our art.

/Artist Profile/

Benji Reid｜Concept, Direction, Photography and Text

Benji Reid is a British photographer, visual theatre maker, and educator whose work explores the intersections of race, nationhood, gender, and mental health, with a focus on the Black British experience and Black masculinity. Winner of the Wellcome Photography Prize (2020, Mental Health category) for Holding on to Daddy (2016), Reid describes himself as a Choreo-Photolist—a term he coined to capture his unique practice of merging theatre, choreography, and photography.

A pioneer of Hip Hop Theatre in the UK, Reid began his career as a dancer and choreographer, performing with Soul II Soul on international tours and collaborating with leading companies such as the David Glass Ensemble and Black Mime Theatre. He later founded Breaking Cycles and Process 06, platforms that expanded the artistic and educational possibilities of Hip Hop Theatre.

Since turning to photography in 2011, Reid has exhibited internationally, with work shown at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (New York), Somerset House (London), and Design Fair Paris. His photography—part ritual, part image-making, part prayer—draws on deeply personal narratives, celebrating love and vulnerability while challenging stereotypes of Black masculinity.

Photo by Benji Reid

/ Here is a gift for you, and also for myself.

Don’t forget—

we each have our own vision, our own world, and our own purpose.

                                               ——Benji Reid /