“We have to look after each other because no one else will,” Gracie Brackstone writes in Heaven & Hell, Love & Loss, her new photo book which traces the whiplash of life between 2024 and 2025. “Life this year has been confusing – the best times of my life and also some of the hardest. I have a lot of anger at the world and frustration for not being able to change it. It’s been both heaven and hell. Consumed by love and loss.”

True to its title, the project captures how the extremes of human conditions exist alongside one another, as Brackstone captures what it means to exist at a time defined by political ruin, accelerating unrest, grief, love and the uneasy realisation that joy now exists under surveillance. These themes run throughout the book, captured in their different forms between London, Manchester and a trip to Barcelona, alongside equally confessional diaristic text.

Much of the work documents her relationship with her girlfriend, Bambi, as the pair find love amidst the chaos around them. The images are tender, charged with the kind of bare-it-all romance usually reserved for private exchanges and handwritten letters. “Love is the most grounding, yet most elevating experience,” she explains, “I think being in love right now, like a head over heels, beautiful, intoxicating kind of love, is one of the most powerful tools for resistance.” 

This love is also a space of soft landing for Brackstone, providing the refuge of being with someone who understands the weight of the world outside. “In times of political outbursts, where things seem absolutely insane, having my girlfriend there is genuinely just all I could ask for. We sit in her room and we speak about the world till the sun comes up, putting it to rights, dissecting things, being scared but safe with each other.” 

It’s a care that extends to the community the couple have built around them: shots within the project are often populated by groups of friends, wielding placards at marches, deep in the sweaty enclosure of a festival tent or curled up on shorefront as dusk closes around them. “I believe I am so passionate about life and connection because I have been in the depths of despair. I have lost my mum and one of my best friends, yet from that, I have learnt the meaning of what love truly means”. This navigation of loss, and the anticipation of what’s left to lose, threads throughout the series. One photograph of Brackstone’s friend Ash, who passed away a year and a half ago, sits at its centre. “She was the epitome of community in Manchester; she cared and kiki’d with everyone, so it made sense to have her at the heart of the book.”

While club nights, parties and grassy festival grounds appear frequently in the book, Brackstone is grappling with an increasingly uneasy relationship to Manchester's rave scene. “The dance floors haven't been healing me like they used to, the raves haven't felt as bright, or as colourful, truth be told,” she writes in the project’s text. It’s a disillusionment she can trace back to the intentions of people within the scene, drug issues and her overwhelming disappointment with the lack of political action within inherently political spaces of resistance. “I would step into a rave and I felt like no one understood what was going on in the outside world and it really scared me.” 

Brackstone instead found the community she was looking for at demonstrations throughout the city, among people who shared the same sense of outrage at the state of the world around them. “We have been socialised into conformity, scared to strike, scared to protest,” she says, reflecting on a UK she feels is increasingly hostile to dissent. Many shots are of marches for trans rights and for Palestine, with images accompanied by bold proclamations like “ONE STRUGGLE, ONE FIGHT, PALESTINE AND TRANS RIGHTS” and softer lines of text: “I want to live to see all the dolls and divas turn a hundred years old,” reads one caption.

It’s in this way that Heaven & Hell, Love & Loss becomes a way of preserving these times, both as resistance to increasing political erasure and as the photographer’s own personal remembrance. “I want people to find hope in the project: hope that we can all unite, that we can build a better future together. Together, we are stronger than any elite power; there are so many more of us.”

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