The creative work that defined my 2025
Photos and videos I'm proud of.
Oh, the cold.
The cold that wraps around me and steals my breath, stings my nose, burns my lungs. The cold that stills the water and freezes the grass and cracks beneath my numb feet. The cold that keeps the pathogens at bay, that germinates the winter seeds, that swallows the insects and the hibernators in a deep sleep until the season’s turning.
The cold that is blissful and welcome, that sharp, aching, beautiful cold.
Before the last of the day’s bells toll the perihelion, I wanted to look back on some of the creative work I’m most proud of from the year.
No doubt you have already received countless 2025 retrospective emails already, so I’ll keep this brief and visual.
Photographs
After losing my job earlier in the year, I took the opportunity to spend over a month in Barcelona.
The castells that pop up around the city - incredible towers of people with teams striving to make the tallest - were a magnificent example of community and culture, a welcome reminder of what it means for humans to create something beautiful and organic in a time of AI-generated slop.
The holy mountain range of Montserrat commanded views over much of Catalonia. A cool wind and hazy blue gradients reminded me of my insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
When the sun descended and the shadows lengthened each afternoon, I took a stroll around our neighbourhood near Horta. The light was golden and magical.
In the medieval walled city of Gerona, huge flocks of swifts circled the rooftops.
I took this photograph with a 70-year-old Helios lens from the Soviet Union:
In the midst of one of the UK’s heatwaves this summer, I took a train up to the blissfully windswept Northumberland coast to photograph puffins.
I always forget how close I live to Epping Forest. Just a 30-minute train journey out of London, I made the most of the autumn sunshine to walk its copper-lined paths.
Two people spent the afternoon talking at the foot of this old, old tree.
Films
The Essex Ways (runtime: 75 mins)
Over the course of his 400km hike around Essex to reconnect with its ancient landscape and shrug off its negative stereotypes, I documented James Lawrence’s passionate journey in a documentary.
Woodcraft (runtime: 8 mins)
My godfather spends most days in his workshop, creating complex automata from recycled materials. I made a gentle, relaxing short film about his process to celebrate his work and legacy.
I lost my job. (runtime: 4 mins)
A short video (are vlogs still a thing? It’s kind of a vlog) about my personal experience in Spain after redundancy.
If you want to catch up on any posts you missed from 2025, they’re free to read here - all 106 of them.
I want to thank you for all your readership and support over the last year. Many of you have been reading my work regularly since I started this newsletter in March 2023, and it’s because of your continued enthusiasm that I am still writing today.
If you want to support my work beyond just reading it, then sharing, liking and subscribing really helps tell the algorithm that this is worth looking at and is vital for small creators like me. If you want to chat, you can simply reply to the emails that you receive or contact me at hello@thomaswinward.com. I respond to every email.
You can also buy me a coffee here, either as a one-off tip or a monthly subscription. Donations go towards the production costs of the films I make. It’s thanks to the generosity of my supporters that I can keep creating art for people to enjoy for free, so a huge shout-out and a massive thank you to anyone who has supported.
More to come in 2026.
Have a restful, peaceful new year.
Beautiful cold indeed! So good to have some real winter weather at last. Congratulations on all your creative endeavours in 2025 and best wishes for the year ahead.
I've been drawing feverishly lately, sometimes doing 4-5 drawings a day in my sketchbook. I likely can't use any of what I drew this year to make money, so it's purely for entertainment purposes. And the only person I am entertaining is me at the moment! But it still feels like an important thing to do in a time when AI can make everything "better" and "faster" and "cheaper"... We live in truly disturbing times, & the only antidote for me is vintage music, coffee and drawing. Wishing you a Wondrous, & Prosperous New Year!