A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

Latest Episodes:

242 - Polly Braden Oct 23, 2024

Polly Braden is a documentary photographer whose work features an ongoing conversation between the people she photographs and the environment in which they find themselves. Highlighting the small, often unconscious gestures of her subjects, Polly particularly enjoys long-term, in depth collaborations that in turn lends her photographs a unique, quiet intimacy. She works on long-term, self-initiated projects, as well as commissions for international publications.

Polly has produced a large body of work that includes not only solo exhibitions and magazine features, but a number of books published by Dewi Lewis, including Holding The Baby (2022), Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of People with Autism or Learning Disabilities (2018), and China Between (2010), and two published by Hoxton Mini Press: London’s Square Mile: A Secret City (2019) and Adventures in the Lea Valley), (2016).

Polly teaches regularly at The University of Westminster and London College of Communication (LCC), she is a winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize, The Guardian Young Photographer of the Year, 2002, and the Joanna Drew Bursary 2013. Polly is nominated by Hundred Heroines 2020 and she has exhibited at numerous venues internationally. Her most recent solo exhibition, of her project Leaving Ukraine, just ended at the Foundling Museum in London, where it was on show from March 15th to October 20th 2024.

In episode 242, Polly discusses, among other things:

Exhitibition at the Foundling Museum, Leaving Ukraine and how it came about
Some of the people she focussed on
Holding The Baby , her project on single parents
Jena’s story
Why she has started working with film projects
Her introduction to photography
Her first trip to China: “an exercise in isolation”
Her project on Chinese factories and their workers
Great Interactions book on people with learning disabilities
Her current project she’s working on
Securing funding, building partnerships and being an entrepreneur

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“I’m not someone who wanted to just jump in, point a camera at someone and walk away. I think I’ve always been someone who wanted it to feel very collaborative. Whether you’re on the street and you’ve made eye contact and you feel like someone’s ok with it, at the very basic level, to now as I get older, when I’d be as interested in someone doing all the work and me just being a vehicle through which someone can tell their story.”

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073 - Paul Lowe (pt.2) Oct 15, 2024

REPOSTING THESE EPISODES FROM JANUARY 2018 IN MEMORY OF PAUL LOWE, WHO HAS SADLY DIED AT THE AGE OF 60. This is part two of a two part chat with Dr. Paul Lowe. Paul is a Reader in Documentary Photography and the Course Leader of the Masters program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. Before elected to put his cameras away in favour of a life in academia, Paul was an award-winning news and documentary photographer with several World Press Photo awards under his belt and many years of experience covering breaking news the world over, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian revolution, Nelson Mandela’s release, famine in Africa, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and the destruction of Grozny during the conflict in Chechnya. His pictures have appeared in such esteemed publications as TIME, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer, and The Independent, amongst others. His book, Bosnians, documenting 10 years of the war and post-war situation in Bosnia, was published in April 2005 by Saqi books. His research interest focuses on the photography of conflict, and he has contributed chapters to the books Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaktion, 2012) and Photography and Conflict. His most recent books include Photography Masterclass (buy on Amazon) published by Thames and Hudson, and Understanding Photojournalism, co-authored with Dr. Jenny Good, published by Bloomsbury Academic Press (Buy on Amazon). - Become a full tier 1 member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of previous episodes for £5 per month. - For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here. - Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides. - Follow me on Instagram here. - Build Yourself a Squarespace Website video course here.

071 - Paul Lowe (pt.1) Oct 15, 2024

REPOSTING THESE EPISODES FROM JANUARY 2018 IN MEMORY OF PAUL LOWE, WHO HAS SADLY DIED AT THE AGE OF 60. This is part one of a two part chat with Dr. Paul Lowe. Paul is a Reader in Documentary Photography and the Course Leader of the Masters program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. Before elected to put his cameras away in favour of a life in academia, Paul was an award-winning news and documentary photographer with several World Press Photo awards under his belt and many years of experience covering breaking news the world over, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian revolution, Nelson Mandela’s release, famine in Africa, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and the destruction of Grozny during the conflict in Chechnya. His pictures have appeared in such esteemed publications as TIME, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer, and The Independent, amongst others. His book, Bosnians, documenting 10 years of the war and post-war situation in Bosnia, was published in April 2005 by Saqi books. His research interest focuses on the photography of conflict, and he has contributed chapters to the books Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaktion, 2012) and Photography and Conflict. His most recent books include Photography Masterclass (buy on Amazon) published by Thames and Hudson, and Understanding Photojournalism, co-authored with Dr. Jenny Good, published by Bloomsbury Academic Press (Buy on Amazon). - Become a full tier 1 member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of previous episodes for £5 per month. - For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here. - Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides. - Follow me on Instagram here. - Build Yourself a Squarespace Website video course here.

241 - Agnieszka Sosnowska Oct 09, 2024

Agnieszka Sosnowska was born in Warsaw, Poland and was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a MFA from Boston University. She is currently an elementary school teacher. She lives on farm
in East Iceland. She is recognised for her self portraits that span 30 years. Currently she is working on series that embodies her life as an immigrant in Iceland. She uses the camera to take inspiration from a land that is otherworldly.

“I grew up in Boston and traveled to Iceland 25 years ago on a whim”, says Agnieszka. “I fell in love and remained. With my Icelandic husband I chose to live in nature, not visit it. This decision has not been without tests. Together we have made a life that I feel we are only beginning. Everyday, I search for corners of quiet. When there, I stop and listen for a long time. These places exist around our farm, with friends, and the students I teach. These places are my everyday. They are my everything.”

Agnieszka has been the recipient of a number of grants, including a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to Poland and an American Scandinavian Fellowship to Iceland. She was awarded the Hjálmar R. Bárðarson Photography Grant by the National Museum of Iceland. Her series was awarded the Director’s Choice by the Center awards in 2017 and she has been in the Top 50 of Critical Mass on three occasions. Her work has been exhibited in the National Museum of Iceland and the Reykjavik Museum of Photography. She is represented exclusively by Vision Neil Folberg Gallery in Jerusalem.

Earlier this year, Agnieszka released her debut photobook, För, published by Trespasser Books and already sold out.

Her collaboration with Icelandic poet Ingunn Snædal, entitled RASK, is currently being exhibited at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography until Decembet 2024.

In episode 241, Agnieszka discusses, among other things:

Early years travelling to Communist Poland
Wanting to assimilate into the USA as an immigrant
Early education in photography at Mass. Art
Her early interest in self-portraiture
Not having a plan… but being a hard worker
The trip to Iceland that changed her life…
…and her decision to move there
A description of where she lives
The hardest thing to adapt to being the Winters
The first things she started to photograph there
Self-portaiture and the suckiness of documenting ageing
The freedom of realising that you don’t have to work on distinct ‘projects’
‘Myth of a Woman’ - her attempt at exploring the experience of womanhood
Collaborating with her students on portrait sessions
The last picture in the book
Her collaboration with Icelandic poet Ingunn Snædal, RASK, currently an exhibition at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography

Referenced:

Cindy Sherman
Margaret Johnson
Laura McPhee
Ingunn Snædal
Barbara Bosworth

Website | Instagram

“I wanted to grow. I just didn’t know how. And I think the only way you grow is not by thinking about it but by doing it and making the mistakes. And I made a lot of mistakes. And thank God I did because in doing the mistakes I started to get more to having the self-portraits be more real. And that’s really hard to do. Especially I think as me having done it for so long, and also getting older in front of a camera, as a woman, it’s hard.”

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240 - Robbie Lawrence Sep 25, 2024

Robbie Lawrence is a London based Scottish photographer and director represented by Webber Represents. Robbie is acutely attentive to the way images tell a story. Working with a painterly softness and sensitivity to his subjects, he deals in detail and nuance. From portraiture, travel and documentary to editorial work, he places the human experience front and centre to create thoughtful, abstract images, with an emphasis on narrative.

Recent books include Blackwater River and A Voice Above The Linn published by Stanley/Barker. Stills gallery in Edinburgh hosted the first UK institutional solo exhibition by Robbie in 2022, bringing together a snapshot of life post-Brexit across Scotland’s cities, rural locations and coastal towns.

Robbie’s new book, Long Walk Home, was just released (September 2024) by Stanley/Barker.

Clients Include: UN, Apple, Nike, Hermes, Gucci, The New Yorker, Du Monde, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, I-D and many others.

In episode 240, Robbie discusses, among other things:

His recent assignment at The Olympics
His internship in Paris and his time in New York
His relationship to painting and writing
Building a career to encompass commercial and personal work
How working commercially can be a ‘relief’.
His ‘macrojournalistic approach’
His first book project, Blackwater River
His second book, A Voice Above The Linn
Collaboration with poet John Burnside
His new book about the Highland Games, Long Walk Home.
Why he threw away three years worth of work and began again
Working digitally with ‘manual’ lenses
The difference between myth and history
A reading from John Burnside’s essay in the book

Referenced:

The Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa
The French, William Klein
John Burnside
Renton’s rant on why it’s ‘shite being Scottish’ from the movie Trainspotting

Website | Instagram

“I like the variety […] I like being on set. You become more like a director. As a photographer you’re almost the emotional heartbeat of a set. It’s interesting because at school and university I really found exams hellish from an expectation point of view. Like, I would put myself under a lot of pressure. And I would describe some of those more pressurised commercial jobs almost like a school exam where you expected to produce something of quality under a very tight time constraint. As a physical experience it can feel similar, and I suppose maybe it’s just experience that I can now recall moments where I’ve overcome those kind of stresses. So I like the shift.”

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239 - Kiana Hayeri Sep 11, 2024

Visual storyteller Kiana Hayeri grew up in Tehran and moved to Toronto while she was still a teenager. Faced with the challenges of adapting to a new environment, she took up photography as a way of bridging the gap in language and culture. In 2014, a short month before NATO forces pulled out, Kiana moved to Kabul and stayed on for 8 years. Her work often explores complex topics such as migration, adolescence, identity and sexuality in conflict-ridden societies.

In 2014, Kiana was named as one of the emerging photographers by PDN 30 Under 30. In 2016, she was selected as the recipient of Chris Hondros Award as an emerging photographer. In 2017, she received a grant from European Journalism Center to do a series of reporting on gender equality out of Afghanistan and received Stern Grant in 2018 to continue her work on the state of mental health among afghan women. In 2020, Kiana received Tim Hetherington Visionary award for her proposed project to reveal the dangers of dilettante “hit & run” journalism. Later that year, she was named as the 6th recipient of the James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting. In 2021, Kiana received the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal for her photographic series Where Prison is Kind of a Freedom, documenting the lives of Afghan women in Herat Prison. In 2022, Kiana was part of The New York Times reporting team that won The Hal Boyle Award for The Collapse of Afghanistan and was shortlisted under International Reporting for the Pulitzer Prize. In the same year, she was also named as the winner of Leica Oskar Barnack Award for her portfolio, Promises Written On the Ice, Left In the Sun, an intimate look into the lives of Afghan from all walks of life.

Kiana, along with her colloaborator, the researcher Mélissa Cornet, is recipient of the 2024 Carmignac Photojournalism Award for the reportage No Woman’s Land, an investigation into the plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban and the work will be showcased in a double exhibition this Autumn - from October 25th to November 18th - at the Réfectoire des Cordeliers in Paris as part of the Photo Saint Germain festival.

Kiana is a Senior TED fellow, a National Geographic Explorer grantee and a regular contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic. She is currently based in Sarajevo, telling stories from Afghanistan, The Balkans and beyond.

In episode 239, Kiana discusses, among other things:

Her story for the NYT about FGM in Gambia

Gender apartheid

Her take on winning awards as a photojournalist

Having to Google what the Robert Cap Gold Medal was - having won it

Her book When Cages Fly

Moving to Canada from Iran as a teenager

How photography helped her bridge the ‘culture and language gap’.

Being at a ‘gifted’ school

Her first trip to Afghanistan

Comparisons with Iran in terms of relative ‘liberalism’.

Her first commission from National Geographic

Her story on women in Herat prison

The moment Afghanistan fell to the Taliban and her guilt over leaving friends behind

Gender apartheid in Afghanistan specifically

The dangers of ‘dilettante hit and run journalism’

Referenced:

Eddie Adams workshops

“I tell people having a camera is like living a thousand different lives, but you have that camera as an excuse to immerse yourself into something, live it for a while and then walk away when you’re ready.”

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238 - Diana Matar Aug 28, 2024

Using photography, testimony and archive, Diana Matar's in-depth bodies of work investigate themes of history, memory and state sponsored violence. Grounded in heavy research and often spending years on a project, Diana attempts to capture the invisible traces of human history and produces installations and books that query what role aesthetics might playin the depiction of power. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Diana has received the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art; the International Fund for Documentary Photography; a Ford Foundation Grant for artists making work on history and memory; and twice been awarded an Arts Council of England Individual Artist Grant. Her work is held in public and private collections and has been exhibited in numerous institutions including Tate Modern, London; The National Museum of Singapore; Museum Folkswang, Essen, Germany; The Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Musee de la Photographie a Charleroi. Her monograph Evidencewas published in 2014 by Schilt Publishing Amsterdam to critical acclaim and chosen by New York Times Photography critic Teju Cole as one of two best photography books of the year. In 2019 Matar was appointed Distinguished Artist at Barnard College Columbia University, New York. In April 2024 Diana’s most recent book, My America, was published by GOST Books.

In episode 238, Diana discusses, among other things:

Early experiences in Panama and Latin America.
How an errand to buy a lightbulb changed everything.
A brush with Manuel Noriega.
How she met her Libyan husband, the writer Hisham Matar.
Why she found doing her M.A. ‘really, really challenging’.
Her first book project, Evidence.
The inclusion of her own writing in the book.
Her latest book, My America.
Some of the key factors around the issue of police shootings.
The complexities of the subject.
How she has “intermalised a European sense of America.”
Why she shot the project on her iPhone and the rules she imposed on herself.
Whether photographs can ‘bear the burden of history.’
What she is currently working on.
Her reaction to the bonus questions.

Website | Instagram

“I think I internalised a European sense of America in several different ways. When I was out on the road a lot of things seemed exotic to me, things that I’d grown up with and were just part of being: the long distances; these buildings that just pop up in the middle of nowhere; the emptiness; the scale… the kind of watching of movies of what is the American west. The internalisation I think has something to do with scale. I live in London - the small streets, you’re around people all the time, and then being in this openness, which i miss and i love, but I did find it unnerving and it effected how I made the work actually.”

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237 - Abdul Kircher Aug 14, 2024

Abdulhamid Kircher is an artist from Queens, New York. He was born in 1996 in Berlin to German and Turkish parents, and immigrated with his mother to the United States at the age of eight. His work is a living archive of place and people, as it is also a dedication to the language of photography, the mechanics and aesthetic possibilities of the form. Through his devotion to classical forms of image making and the radical experimentation required for each of his subjects, his process bridges the idea between document and narrative. He received his BA in Culture and Media from The New School in 2018 and his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego in 2022. Abdul currently lives and works between Berlin and Los Angeles.

Abdul’s debut photobook, Rotting From Within, was recently published by Loose Joints in June this year (2024). In it Abdul explores identity, patriarchy, generational trauma and the possibility of reconciliation in a diaristic project between Berlin and Turkey. A solo exhibition of the work is currently on show at the Carlier Gebauer gallery in Berlin until the 31st August. The 53 minute documentary film, Noch ein Kind (Still a Kid), 2024, by Abdul’s childhood friend Maxi Hachem, a Lebanese-German filmmaker based in Berlin, is also being screened as part of the exhibition. His documentary investigates the complex relationships and wounded history of Rotting from Within spanning the past three years between Berlin and Turkey.

In episode 237, Abdul discusses, among other things:

His early life “dragging bags of weed around the house”
The history of paternal abuse in his family
How he ended up moving from Berlin to New York
How he got into photography through Tumblr
How his interest in photography drove the reconnection with his father
Where the books title stems from
Parallels between his mum and grandmother
Keeping a diary since highschool
His obsessive nature and tendency for self-flagellation
His partner, Zoe, who contributed text to the book
How the documentary his friend Maxi Hachem shot, Noch Ein Kind (Still A Kid)
How the work has been received as an exhibition
How the process of making the work may or may not have helped him

Website | Instagram

“I love it, but it’s beyond love because it feels like something that I just need to do. That’s why I was talking about photography being such an intuitive thing in my head, it’s because I don’t really have an option. I need to take these photographs, I need to make these photographs, and it’s not really something I have power over. And I think that’s the scary bit, it’s that yes I love it for what it’s allowed me to explore and allowed me to sort of open up to the world, but in that way it’s also become a burden.”

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236 - Louis Quail Jul 31, 2024

Louis Quail is a documentary photographer who increasingly devotes his time to personal, long-term projects. His most recent work ‘Big Brother’ (published with Dewi Lewis, 2018), has received significant critical acclaim. The book and the work in it has been shortlisted for the Arles Book and Text award 2018, Wellcome Trust photography prize 2019 and is winner of the Renaissance Series Prize 2017. His Arts Council funded, Solo show, ‘Before They Were Fallen’ also received significant exposure. It toured the UK and reflects an interest in aftermath that has taken him, previously to Libya, Afghanistan, Haiti and Kosovo. He has worked extensively for some of the UK’s best known magazines and has been published internationally over a period of many years. He has twice been a finalist at the National Portrait Gallery portraiture award and is held in their permanent collection. He lectures, exhibits internationally and makes short films.

In episode 236, Louis discusses, among other things:

How the subject of his book, his big brother Justin, is doing
Childhood with his schizophrenic mum
Why he believes firmly in the importance of tolerance
The way that he approached telling his brother’s story
Some of the structural and political issues that impact people with mental health issues
The importance of not over-focussing on some of the un-pc language that some of us use in daily life (including me, in this example)
How he found his way into photography
His portrait series ‘Aftermath’ which began in Kosovo
His career as a jobbing editorial photographer
HIs latest project about air pollution

Website | Instagram

“I’m not judgemental, I’m quite tolerant, and I do think that’s an important quaility that’s very much overlooked, especially these days on Twitter when everyone’s reacting to stuff all the time. I don’t like that. I’m really just into giving people a bit of space an allowing people to make some mistakes.”

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235 - Debi Cornwall Jul 17, 2024

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Her work explores the performance of power, citizenship and identity through still and moving images, sound, testimony, and archival material.

While completing a degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Debi studied photography at RISD. After working for photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy, as an AP stringer, and as an investigator for the federal public defender's office, she attended Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney for more than a decade, also training as a mediator. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her visual practice.

Debi was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland with the support of Parmigiani Fleurier. The award enabled her to complete Model Citizens, now a book in English and French editions (Radius/Textuel) and an exhibition at the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles festival. She is also a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist Grantee in film, a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography, and inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award winner. Debi’s work has been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, the New York Times Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and is held in public and private collections around the world.

Debi has published two previous books, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay and Necessary Fictions. She is also an ICP faculty member, teaching students how to plumb deeper layers in their work, and consults independently with artists developing long-term projects.

In episode 235, Debi discusses, among other things:

Winning the Prix Elysée
Her path into a legal career in civil rights
The ightbulb moment that took her to Guantanamo Bay
Working around restrictions imposed
“The performance of American power”
Her secoond book Necessary Fictions
Her films Pineland/Hollywood and Jade Helm
Her latest book Model Citizens

Website | Instagram

“I don’t think it’s a thread in the work so much as something that I’m really sitting with personally and creatively, but I have this advocate self who is outraged and frustrated at what is happening in our societies. And I have a trained mediator in me, which is more consistent with my creative approach, who thinks none of this changes unless we can really talk to each other across these divides; unless we can accept each other’s humanity and hear each other. Because that isn’t happening.”

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234 - Photomeet 2024 Special Jul 03, 2024

Featuring:

Mimi Mollica website/Instagram
Keerthana Kunnath website/Instagram
Mikael Buck website/Instagram
Chris Dorley Brown website/Instagram
Shaw & Shaw website/Instagram
Mal Woolford website/Instagram
Imogen Forte website/Instagram
Quetzal Maucci website/Instagram
Richard Eyers website/Instagram

Website | Instagram

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233 - Chloé Jafé Jun 19, 2024

Born in Lyon in 1984 represented by Ibasho and galerie écho 119, Chloé Jafé is an artist and a photographer trained at the École de Condé in Lyon and at the UAL Central Saint Martins School in London.
She has been able to create a unique personal voice in the world of documentary photography. Those close to her say bluntly that she photographs with her gut, using the camera as a key to understanding the strange and the foreign. Her obsession and intuition has enabled her to access secret worlds. Her ability to connect to her subjects has meant her work really is exceptionally personal – the world through Chloe Jafes eyes.
She worked and immersed herself in Japan and Japanese culture from 2013-2019 creating a trilogy of work. The images are raw, black and white, tender and ferocious. She reveals an unprecedented vision of hidden parts of Japanese society. Her trilogy, composed of the chapters “I give you my life", "Okinawa mon amour" and "How I met Jiro", highlights the little-known and subversive sides of a place where modesty is paramount.
Critically acclaimed, her work on the women of the Yakuza was rewarded by the Bourse du Talent in 2017 and exhibited at the Bibliotèque nationale de France.
Attracted by sensitive and difficult subjects, often marginal, Chloé Jafé does not hesitate in her practice to push the limits of the photographic medium by working directly on prints, in acrylic and brush. Each of her series has resulted in a limited edition book, bound and handcrafted by the artist.

In episode 233, Chloé discusses, among other things:

Photography as ‘a tool’
Her first trip to Japan
Moving there
Hostess job
Meeting ‘the boss’
The women of The Yakuza
The significance of tattoos
Painting onto her prints
Her trilogy of books: I Give You My Life, Okinawa Mon Amour and How I Met Jiro
Finding abandoned negatives
Adventures in publishing

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“I was sure this project was mine. I had to do this. You know, I think I was frustrated that I was the right person to do this, and it was my mission. I was sure about that.”

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232 - Photo London 2024 Special Jun 05, 2024

Featuring:

Lydia Goldblatt Website | Instagram
Kamiar Maleki Website | Instagram
Michelle Sank Website | Instagram
Gered Mankowitz Website | Instagram
Alys Tomlinson Website | Instagram | Mother Vera film
Fariba Farshad Website | Instagram
Charlotte Jansen Website | Instagram
Andi Gáldi Vinkó Website | Instagram
Anne-Marie Beckmann Website
Renée Mussai Instagram
Valérie Belin Website | Instagram
Matt Stuart Website | Instagram
Chloé Jafé Website | Instagram

Photo London: Website | Instagram

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231 - Fotografia Europea 2024 Special May 22, 2024

Featuring:

Silvia Rosi Website | Instagram
Arko Datto Website | Instagram
Yvonne Venegas Website | Instagram
Tim Clark
Marta Bogdanska Website | Instagram
Michele Sibiloni Website | Instagram

Referenced:

Festival: Website | Instagram / Collezione Maramotti: Website | Instagram

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230 - Julia Kochetova May 08, 2024

Julia Kochetova (b. 1993) is a Ukrainian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker based in Kyiv. Her work focuses on firsthand storytelling as a method, researching topics of the war generation, post-traumatic stress disorder, and feminism.

Julia studied journalism at Taras Shevchenko National University (UA) and Mohyla School of Journalism (UA), alongside participating in IDFAcademy (NL). As a freelancer, Julia has covered the Maidan revolution (2013-2014), the annexation of Crimea (2014), and the Russia-Ukraine war (2014-now). She is a regular contributor to Der Spiegel, Vice News, Zeit, Bloomberg, The Guardian, amongst others.

In 2023, Julia won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Continuing News Coverage: Long Form with VICE News Tonight and in 2024, just a few weeks ago, was the global winner of the Open Format category in the World Press Photo awards for her multi-media project War Is Personal.

In episode 230, Julia discusses, among other things:

Viewing the war as a long-term project.
Not choosing to be a war photoghrapher.
Still photographs no longer ‘working’ - importance of text.
How her WPP winning project was done ‘last minute’.
Her love/hate relationship with Instagram.
How all her plans changed in 2014 with the Maidan Revolution.
Her documentary film project See You Later.
What she means by ‘it’s about the photographs I haven’t taken’.
A valuable lesson learned about behaving ethically.
How war has deprived her of the capacity for joy.

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“I’m really grateful that our story is being told by Ukrainian photographers, but it never was about career ambition. We Ukrainian storytellers were never in the position that we chose to become war photographers. I keep saying I’m not a war photographer. I’m photographing war because this is what’s happening in my country. I have zero wish to photograph any other wars. I’m doing this because this is my war. That’s the only accurate skill I have.”

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229 - Michael Ackerman Apr 24, 2024

Michael Ackerman was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1967. When he was seven years old his family emigrated to New York City, where he grew up and began photographing at the age of eighteen. Michael has exhibited internationally and published five books, including End Time City, by Robert Delpire, which won the Prix Nadar in 1999. His other books are Epilogue (Void, 2019) Half Life (Delpire, 2010) Fiction (Delpire, 2001) and Smoke (l'axolotl, 2023). His work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Biliothèque National, France among others, as well as in many private collections.

“In Michael Ackerman’s work, documentary and autobiography conspire with fiction, and all of the above dissolve into hallucination. His photography explores time and timelessness, personal history and the history of places, immediate family and love, with all it’s complexities and contradictions. “ Jem Cohen.

Michael currently lives in Berlin and is represented by Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris, Spot Home Gallery, Naples and MC2 Gallery, Milan.

In episode 229, Michael discusses, among other things:

A little family history
Why he put that info on his website
Collating family photos on becoming a father
Why he loves New York
How he started photography there
Being ‘very, very slow’
Why he uses cheap plastic cameras
What he likes about photographing animals
Mood
Anders Petersen
Longing being the human condition
Photographing ‘life’
Text and context
Transcending the facts while keeping a strong hold on a deeper truth
His life in Berlin with an impossible ‘to do’ list

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“For me photography is always a negotiation between confrontation and avoidance. And I think my pictures show that. I think my pictures are very intimate and they do get close to something and they are an attempt at getting close, but there’s also a lot of fear in them I see, because I know it in myself, and a lot of solitude.”

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228 - Valerie Belin Apr 10, 2024

A student at the École Beaux-arts de Versailles (1983–1985), and then at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges (1985-1988), French artist Valerie Belin obtained the French higher national diploma in visual expression in 1988 and also holds a diploma in advanced studies (DEA) in the philosophy of art from the Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne (1989).

Initially influenced by various minimalist and conceptual tendencies, Valérie became interested in the photographic medium in its own right; this is at once the subject of her work and her way of reflecting and creating. Light, matter and the “body” of things and beings in general, as well as their transformations and representations, constitute the terrain of her experiments and the world of her artistic ideas. Her work is articulated in photographic series, each one produced within the framework of a specific project.

Valérie’s work has been exhibited around the world and is held in numerous public and private collections. Winner of the Prix Pictet in 2015 (Disorder), she was made an officer of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017. This same year, a touring exhibition was co-produced by the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing, the SCôP in Shanghai and the Chengdu Museum. In 2019, Valérie unveiled a major new series at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and this year, 2024, she has been named as Master of Photography at Photo London where she will have a major career retrospective.

Valerie lives and works in Paris.

In episode 228, Valerie discusses, among other things:

Her father being an artist at heart
The influence of a particular teacher
The dual influence of American minimal art and Italian baroque art
How she discovered photography and was inspired by a misogynistic teacher
Not photographing people initially
Presence and absence
Why she chose bodybuilders as her first foray into shooting people
The theme of beauty
How women are ‘attacked’ by stereotypes
AI being paradoxical to what she wants to show
The importance of Photoshop to her practice
Where the ideas come from
Use of comic books
Making a living
Recent series’ ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lady Stardust’.

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“I think it’s still true to say I’m very close to my medium and to the hybridation, because if you think of it what is photography today when with the same camera you can make videos, you can make whatever you want? I think we are in a time when you always have a kind of superimposition in your mind, you have several channels on all the time in your mind and maybe my pictures are showing that way of thinking or way of living.”

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227 - Linda Troeller Mar 27, 2024

Linda Troeller’s art projects focus on self-portraits, women's and social issues. For 20 year she lived in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York City, curating an exhibition for the 125th Anniversary, “Chelsea Hotel Through the Eyes of Photographers”, and publishing a monograph of her own entitled Living in the Chelsea Hotel.

Other publications include Healing Waters, The Erotic Lives of Women and her newest book of self-portraits taken over almost fifty years, Sex, Death, Transcendence, published earlier this year (2024) by TBW books. Linda was also the subject of a 2023 feature-length documentary film, also entitled Healing Waters, directed by Derek Johnson and Ali Scattergood.

She has lectured at the School of Visual Arts, NYU, Parsons, Yale, Salzburg Summer Art Academy, New Orleans Photo Alliance, and Ryerson University, Toronto and was a professor of photography at Stockton College of New Jersey, Indiana University, and Bournemouth College, England. She has a MFA, School of Art, and MS, Newhouse School, Syracuse University and BS from Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University.

Linda lives in New York City and New Jersey.

In episode 227, Linda discusses, among other things:

Modelling on an Ansel Adams book making workshop
The experience of being nude in front of strangers
The spirit of the 60s in the 70s + women’s lib
Healing waters
Societies expectations of women and ageing
Her book, The Erotic Lives of Women
Living in the Chelsea Hotel for 20 years
How Alexander MacQueen influenced her visual palette
How she has earned a living over the years
Her TB/Aids project

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“You have to do some work to build up your self confidence, to be your most youness. ‘You’. Youness, herness, hisness, theirness, whatever it is that you wanna to be your most of you can make some strides by looking at yourself and understanding yourself. And if you want to do some more in your presentation you can. And you should.”

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226 - Nicole Tung Mar 13, 2024

Nicole Tung is a freelance photojournalist. She graduated from New York University, double majoring in history and journalism, and freelances for international publications and NGOs, working primarily in the Middle East and Asia. After covering the conflicts in Libya and Syria extensively from 2011, focusing on the plight of civilians, she spent 2014 documenting the lives of Native American war veterans in the US, as well as former child soldiers in the DR Congo, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the refugee crisis in Europe. She is also a grantee of the IWMF Grant for Women’s Stories, and a fellow of the IWMF Great Lakes Reporting Initiative (D.R. Congo, Central African Republic).

She has received multiple awards for her work from the International Photo Awards, Society of Professional Journalists, PX3, and was named PDN's 30 Under 30 Emerging Photographers (2013), among others. Nicole was given the honorable mention for the IWMF 2017 Anja Niedringhaus Awards, and awarded the 2018 James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting from the Online News Association. Her work has been exhibited + screened at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, Visa Pour l'Image, and most recently at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy award for war correspondents in France (2019), with Save the Children in Hong Kong (2019), and at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong (2020). Nicole has also given keynote speeches and contributed to panels on photojournalism and journalist safety, at events including the International Journalism Festival (Perugia, 2019), TEDx in Sweden, the Adobe Make It Conference in Sydney, and Creative Mornings at the National Geographic Auditorium in Washington D.C., among others. She served on the board of the Frontline Freelance Register (2015) and is has undergone HEFAT training with Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) and Global Journalist Security. She is based in Istanbul, Turkey.

In episode 226, Nicole discusses, among other things:

Notable differences between the war in Ukraine and previous conflicts she has covered
The modern use of drones in warfare
Stories she has covered in Ukraine
The way she works with publications
Managing and thinking about risk
The question of whether journalists in conflict zones are more likely to be targeted now than in the past
Reactions to her from ordinary people in conflicts
The question of whether photojournalism is an ‘important’ job
The impacts of social media both negative and positive
Approaching photojournalistic stories in a different way
Potential ways to earn a living other than from commissions

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“If you don’t become trapped in this idea that what you do is so precious and be real about the impact and the degree to which images and photojournalism can go, especially if your intentions are good, you’re based in reality at least. Your grounded in a certain reality where you go “I know my images aren’t going to stop a war tomorrow but at least I can be a part of that documentation process.” And to me that is important. Why shouldn’t we be showing a reflection of our collective humanity that is both ugly and beautiful at the same time? There are so many grey areas. The world is not black and white.”

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225 - Mitch Epstein Feb 28, 2024

Mitch Epstein helped pioneer fine-art color photography in the 1970s. His photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern in London.

In October 2024, Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy will present a major multi-media exhibition of Mitch’s project, Old Growth; and in September 2024, Old Growth will be shown in NYC at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Mitch’s Indian photographs and films (Salaam Bombay! and India Cabaret) were exhibited in 2022 at Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in France. Mitch has had numerous other major solo exhibitions in the USA and worldwide.

Mitch’s seventeen books, all published by Steidl Verlag, include Recreation (2022); Property Rights (2021); In India (2021); Rocks and Clouds (2017); New York Arbor (2013); Berlin (Steidl/The American Academy in Berlin 2011); American Power (2009); and Family Business (2003), which was winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.

In 2020, Mitch was inducted into the National Academy of Design. In 2011, he won the Prix Pictet for American Power. Among his other awards are the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003).

Mitch has worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Mississippi Masala, and Salaam Bombay!. He lives with his family in New York City.

In episode 225, Mitch discusses, among other things:

New York
John Szarkowski at MOMA
Editing
India
Garry Winogrand and his influence
Going to LA in ‘74
Working on the films of his then wife Mira Nair
Trial and error
Family Business
American Power
Old Growth

Referenced:

John Szarkowski
Eugene Atget
Diane Arbus
William Eggleston
Todd Papageorge
Raghubir Singh
Jonas Mekas
Hollis Frampton

Website | Instagram

“Through disorientation, through not knowing, through being uncomfortable, things happen. And I think some of the most important periods for me in my life as an artist have been those periods where I have ultimately not known what I was doing or where I was going next. Now I’m a little bit better at just listening to the signals that come along, even though they may not give me the full-fledged answer they’ll just point in a direction. And I’m a little bit more patient with the process.”

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224 - Edward Burtynsky Feb 14, 2024

Edward Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world's most accomplished contemporary photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes represent over 40 years of his dedication to bearing witness to the impact of human industry on the planet. Edward's photographs are included in the collections of over 80 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

Edward was born in 1955 of Ukrainian heritage in St. Catharines, Ontario. He received his BAA in Photography/Media Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in 1982, and has since received both an Alumni Achievement Award (2004) and an Honorary Doctorate (2007) from his alma mater. He is still actively involved in the university community, and sits on the board of directors for The Image Centre (formerly Ryerson Image Centre).

In 1985, Edward founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom rental facility, custom photo laboratory, digital imaging, and new media computer-training centre catering to all levels of Toronto's art community.

Early exposure to the General Motors plant and watching ships go by in the Welland Canal in Edward’s hometown helped capture his imagination for the scale of human creation, and to formulate the development of his photographic work. His imagery explores the collective impact we as a species are having on the surface of the planet — an inspection of the human systems we've imposed onto natural landscapes.

Exhibitions include: Anthropocene (2018) at the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada (international touring exhibition); Water (2013) at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Art Center in Louisiana (international touring exhibition); Oil (2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (five-year international touring show), China (toured internationally from 2005 - 2008); Manufactured Landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada (toured from 2003 - 2005); and Breaking Ground produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (toured from 1988 - 1992). Edward's visually compelling works are currently being exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the globe, including at London’s Saatchi Gallery where his largest solo exhibition to-date, entitled Extraction/Abstraction, is currently on show until 6th May 2024.

Edward’s distinctions include the inaugural TED Prize (which he shared with Bono and Robert Fischell), the title of Officer of the Order of Canada, and the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Art. In 2018 Edward was named Photo London's Master of Photography and the Mosaic Institute's Peace Patron. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Arts & Letters Award at the Canadian Association of New York’s annual Maple Leaf Ball and the 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography. In 2020 he was awarded a Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship and in 2022 was honoured with the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award by the World Photography Organization. Most recently he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and was named the 2022 recipient for the annual Pollution Probe Award. Edward currently holds eight honorary doctorate degrees and is represented by numerous international galleries all over the world.

In episode 224, Edward discusses, among other things:

His transition from film to digital
Staying positive by ‘moving through grief to land on meaning’
Making compelling images and how scale creates ambiguity
Defining the over-riding theme of his work early on
The environmental impact of farming
Whether he planned his career
Why he started a lab to finance his photography
And how being an entrepreneur feeds into his work as an artist
Vertical Integration
Examples of challenging situations he has faced
The necessity for his work to be commoditised
His relative hope and optimism for the future through positive technology
The importance of having a hopeful component to the work
How he offsets his own carbon footprint

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“The evocation of the sense of wonder and the sense of the surreal, or the improbable, or ‘what am I looking at?’, to me is interesting in a time where images are so consumed; that these are not for quick consumption they’re for… slow. And I think that when things reveal themselves slowly and in a more challenging way, they become more interesting as objects to leave in the world. That they don’t just reveal themselves immediately, you can’t just get it in one quick glance and you’re done, no, these things ask you to look at them and spend time with them. And I discover things in them sometimes that I never saw before. They’re loaded with information.”

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223 - Lorenzo Castore Jan 31, 2024

Italian photographer Lorenzo Castore’s work is characterised by long term projects focusing on his personal experience, memory and the relationship between individual stories, history and the present time.

In 1992 at the age of 19 Lorenzo moved from Rome to New York where he began to photograph in the streets. After a formative trip to India in 1997, he had a brief foray into photojournalism, covering the conflicts in Albania and Kosovo in 1999, afte which he decided to quit photojournalism and deepen his personal research.

Since then has worked extensively in Poland, Cuba and Sardinia among other places and has produced several photobooks and a short film entitled No Peace Without War.

In 2019 his lifelong work Time Maze began to be published by L’artiere in progressive chronological volumes. The first entitled A Beginning, 1994-2001 and the second Lack and Locking, 2001-2007. The next two volumes are already in the works or planned.

Lorenzo’s is represented by Galerie S. in Paris, Galerie Anne Clergue in Arles, Alessia Paladini Gallery in Milan, Spot Home Gallery in Naples and Guido Costa Projects in Turin.

In episode 223, Lorenzo discusses, among other things:

His formative years
His journey into photography
His time in New York…
…and the photograph that changed everything
The importance of finding stories and making life an adventure
His project Time Maze - first book A Beginning
His brief foray into photojournalism in Kosovo
Why he went to shoot in Poland
HIs interest in miners
The forthcoming sequels to A Beginning

Referenced:

Michael Ackerman
Anders Petersen
Ramon Pez
Josef Koudelka
Saverio Costanzo
Henri Cartier Bresson
Georgio Mortari
Eloi Gimeno
Christain Cajoule

Website | Instagram

“I was postponing because of this embarrassment that I have when we say you talk about your personal life. It’s a really strange feeling, I really want to do it and at the same time I feel I have to do it very carefully.”

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222 - Natalie Keyssar Jan 17, 2024

Natalie Keyssar is a documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work focuses on the personal effects of political turmoil and conflict, youth culture, and migration. She has a BFA in Painting and Illustration from The Pratt Institute. Natalie has contributed to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Time, Bloomberg Business Week, National Geographic and The New Yorker, and been awarded by organizations including the Philip Jones Griffith Award, the Aaron Siskind Foundation, PDN 30, Magenta Flash Forward, and American Photography. She has taught New Media at the International Center of Photography in New York, and has instructed at various workshops across the US and Latin America with organizations such as Foundry, Women Photograph, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the IWMF. Her work has been supported by The Pulitzer Center, The Magnum Foundation, The National Geographic Society, and the IWMF among many others, and she is the winner of the 2018 ICP Infinity Emerging Photographer Award, the 2019 PH Museum Women Photographer's Grant, and is a winner of the 2023 Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund. She is a Canon Explorer of Light and Co-Founder of the NDA Workshops series with Daniella Zalcman. She speaks fluent Spanish and is available for assignments internationally, as well as teaching and speaking engagements.

In episode 222, Natalie discusses, among other things:

The conflict in Gaza
How the internet and social media is clumsily creating a hive mind
Her Jewish identity and how it shapes her perspective
Her Ukrainian roots and covering the war in Ukraine
Wanting her work to tell you what it feels like
Her first trip to Venezuela and how it was love at first sight

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“There’s this psychological cocktail of rage and grief and desire to act, and since I don’t have any actual useful skills, I’m not a doctor or psychologist or aid worker or fighter, or any of the things I sometimes wish I was, I felt the need to do something. And then there is also a totally selfish need to see it for myself. It feels compulsive. And not like in ‘this is my calling and I’m gonna save the world’, but like it’s compulsive enough to make you get on a plane to go to a country that’s quite dangerous and in horrific turmoil. ”

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221 - Richard Kalvar Jan 03, 2024

Ambiguity is at the forefront of Richard Kalvar’s photography. Richard, who describes context as the “enemy”, seeks mystery and multiple meanings through surprising framing and meticulous timing. He describes his approach as “more like poetry than photojournalism – it attacks on the emotional level.”

Richard has done extensive personal, assignment and commercial work in the United States, France, Italy, England, and Japan, among others, has published a number of solo books including Earthlings (Terriens) in 2007 and his most recent title, Selected Writings, published in 2023 by Damiani, and he has had important exhibitions in the US, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

His work has appeared in Geo, The Paris Review, Creative Camera, Aperture, Zoom, Newsweek, and Photo, among many others. Editorial assignments and even commercial work have given Richard an additional opportunity to do personal photography. He did many documentary stories that allowed him to disengage from documentary mode when the occasion arose.

Richard joined Magnum Photos as an associate member in 1975, and became a full member two years later. He subsequently served several times as vice president, and once as president of the agency.

In episode 221, Richard discusses, among other things:

How he ended up settling in Paris
His introduction to photography
How humour is an intrinsic element of his photographs
how he is playing with things he has trouble dealing with
Why he called up Robert Delpire
VU agency becoming Viva
How he ended up in Magnum
His favourite cities to shoot in
The legal restrictions on shooting in public in different places
Public attitudes towards taking photographs of strangers in public
His new book, Selected Writings
Why his interest is in single images that stand alone

Referenced:

Jérôme Ducrot
André Kertesz
HCB
Robert Frank
Lee Friedlander
Elliott Erwitt
Robert Delpire
Viva Agency
Guy LeQuerec
Gilles Peress
Mary Ellen Mark
Alex Majoli
Jonas Bendiksen
Paolo Pellegrin
Olivia Arthur

Website | Instagram

“I’m most interested in having pictures stand alone, and each one is something you can get into and is a story in itself and is also an imaginary story. I’m working with reality, that’s what’s really interesting to me and it’s also what’s interesting about photography in general, that you’re doing something that looks like real life but obviously isn’t. that’s the edge I like to work on. Where you have the impression that things are going on and not necessarily going on. If I have to tell a story, I feel a certain moral obligation to respect the truth or respect the feelings of the people that are in it. I think that’s a noble thing but for my kind of work it’s a break.”

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220 - Year in Review 2023 Dec 20, 2023

Featuring:

Aaron Schumann
Eugene Richards
Martin Parr
Gregory Crewdson
Nick Brandt
Emma Hardy
Antoine D’Agata
Igor Posner
Stacy Kranitz
Ivor Prickett
Bertrand Meunier
Curran Hatleberg
Trish Morrissey
Moises Saman
Yelena Yemchuk
Benjamin Rassmussen
Ian Berry
Luca Locatelli
Corinne Dufka
Max Pam
Leonard Pongo

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219 - Leonard Pongo Dec 06, 2023

Leonard Pongo is a Belgian-Congolese photographer and visual artist. His long-term project The Uncanny, shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has earned him several international awards and world-wide recognition and was published as a book by GOST earlier this year (2023) as a result of Leonard receiving the ICP GOST First Photo Book Award in 2020.

Leonard’s work has been published worldwide and featured in numerous exhibitions including the recent IncarNations at the Bozar Center for Fine Arts and the The 3rd Beijing Photo Biennial at CAFA Art Museum. He was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016, is a recipient of the Visura Grant 2017, the Getty Reportage Grant 2018 and was shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnack award in 2022.

Leonard’s latest project, Primordial Earth, was shown at the Lubumbashi Biennial and at the Rencontres de Bamako where it was awarded the “Prix de l’OIF”. It was exhibited at the Brussels Centre for Fine Arts for Leonard’s first institutional solo show in Belgium in 2021, at the Oostende Museum of Modern Art and is currently feartured as part of a group show entitled A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern until January 14th 2024.

Leonard divides his time between pursuing long term projects in Congo DR, teaching and assignment work and is also a member of The Photographic Collective. His work is part of institutional and private collections.

In episode 219 Leornard discusses, among other things:

Early creativity encouraged by his architect father
His first experience with photography
His early desire to go to the DRC
His first trip in 2011 against the backdrop of an election
Sensory overwhelm
Playing with mood and ambiguity
Winning the Unseen-Gost Books Publishing Award
Editing down from 70,000 images
His Primordial Earth project
His short film The Necessary Evil

Website | Instagram

“I think behind all the constructions and expectations, right or wrong, that I might have had, there was behind it at the core a very intense need for experience... the only way I could create relations to the land and the environment itself - not the people because that was easy, that was natural - but to the rest, the context, was through experiencing it. It felt to me that was the only way I could ever have anything to say about it.”

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218 - Paris Photo 2023 Special Nov 22, 2023

Featuring:

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217 - Max Pam Nov 08, 2023

Max Pam is an Australian photographer born in 1949 in suburban Melbourne, which as a teenager he found to be grim, oppressive and culturally isolated. He found refuge in the counter-culture of surfing and the imagery of National Geographic and Surfer Magazine and became determined to travel overseas.

Max left Australia at 20, after accepting a job as a photographer assisting an astrophysicist. Together, the pair drove a VW Beetle from Calcutta to London. This adventure proved inspirational, and travel has remained a crucial and continuous link to his creative and personal development. As Gary Dufour noted in his essay in Indian Ocean Journals (Steidl, 2000): “Each photograph is shaped by incidents experienced as a traveller. His photographs extend upon the tradition of the gazetteer; each photograph a record of an experience, a personal account of an encounter somewhere in the world. Each glimpse is part of an unfolding story rather than simply a record of a place observed. While travel underscores his production Pam’s photographs are not the accidental evidence of a tourist.”

Max’s work takes the viewer on compelling journeys around the globe, recording observations with an often surrealist intensity, matching the heightened sensory awareness of foreign travel. The work frequently implies an interior, psychic journey, corresponding with the physical journey of travel. His work in Asian counties is well represented in publications as are his travels in Europe, Australia, and the Indian Ocean Rim cultures including India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Yemen, The Republic of Tanzania, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Cocos and Christmas Islands. The images leave the viewer, as Tim Winton said in Going East (Marval 1992), “grateful for having been taken so mysteriously by surprise and so far and sweetly abroad.”

Max’s first survey show was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1986, and was followed by a mid-career retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1991. He was also the subject of a major exhibition at the Comptoir de la Photographie, Paris in 1990, which covered the work of three decades. He has published several highly acclaimed photographic monographs and 'carnets de voyage', including Going East: Twenty Years of Asian Photography (1992), Max Pam (1999), Ethiopia (1999) and Indian Ocean Journals (2000). Going East won Europe’s major photo book award the Grand Prix du Livre Photographique in 1992. In the same year Max held his largest solo show to date at the Sogo Nara Museum of Art, Nara. He has published work in the leading international journals and is represented in major public and private collections in Australia, Great Britain, France and Japan.

In episode 217 Max discusses, among other things:

How he adopted the visual diary as his photographic approach.
The influence of Diane Arbus.
Why he chose such a specific period of his life to explore in his new memoir.
How Arbus inspired him to shoot 6x6.
How surfing in Australia introduced him travelling.
How he ended up in India and why it fascinates him.
The magic of film vs. digital.
Working with book designers… or not.
The time he failed to get into Magnum Photos.
Surviving financially, teaching, and the importance of ‘marrying up’.
Travel and family.
Returning to Australia in a poor mental state, post typhoid.
His wife’s Alzheimer’s and eventual death.

Referenced:

Philip Jones-Griffith
Don McCullen
Larry Burrows
David Bailey
Diane Arbus
Edward Weston
Tina Modotti
Roger Ballen
George Orwell
Bernard Plossu
Ramon Pez
Sarah Moon
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Peter Beard

Website | Instagram

“I’m a very curious person and ultimately having the camera amplifies that curiosity in a really profound way. And it also gives you carte blanche to stick your head into areas where normally you’d think ‘ah, it’s a bit dodgy, maybe not, I could get my head cut off it I stuck it in the hole…’ But often then you think, ‘well come on man, you’ve got a camera there, isn’t this part of your self image?’ And so it’s like this ticket to ride on something that is actually quite dangerous.”

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216 - Corinne Dufka Oct 25, 2023

Corinne Dufka is an American photojournalist, human rights researcher, criminal investigator, and psychiatric social worker.

Following completion of her master's degree in social work, Corinne worked as a humanitarian volunteer and social worker in Latin America. She volunteered with Nicaraguan refugees during the country's revolution, and with victims of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. She then moved to El Salvador as a social worker with the Lutheran church. While in El Salvador, Corinne became close with local photojournalists, and was asked by the director of a local human rights organization to launch a program to document human rights abuses through photography.

Over the course of her subsequent twelve year career as a photojournalist she covered more than a dozen of the world’s bloodiest armed conflicts across three continents and was honored with the Robert Capa gold medal; a World Press Club Award; a Pulitzer nomination; and the Courage in Journalism Award.

In 1998 Corinne went to Nairobi, Kenya to cover the bombing of the American Embassy. She arrived hours after the blast, and was deeply frustrated by 'missing the scoop.' Later, upon watching the news coverage of the attack, Corinne realized that she had lost “compassion” for the subjects of her work, and resolved to end her career as a photojournalist.

After leaving photojournalism, Corinne joined Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization. In 2003, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, alternatively known as a ‘genius grant’, for her journalistic and documentary work documenting the 'devastation' of Sierra Leone and the conflict's toll on human rights.

Corinne left HRW in 2022 and is now an independent researcher and advisor, focusing on helping countries mitigate the risk of armed conflict. Corinne has a daughter and a foster son and lives in Maryland with her four dogs. Corinne’s new book This Is War: Photographs from a Decade of Conflict is out now, published by G Editions.

In episode 216 Corinne discusses, among other things:

Her reasons for publishing a book of her photograhs
The experience of revisiting her archive
Her transition from psychiatric social worker to photojournalist
How she learnt the basics of photography in El Salvador
How her family history and a challenges in childhood formed her independence
Getting badly injured in Bosnia
The relative dangers of different types of conflict
Her experiences of violence in Liberia
The epiphany that led her to walk away from photojournalism
Her work with Human Rights Watch
‘Curiosity and compassion’
Making an impact

“I just don’t do ‘hopeless’. I constantly try to find a way of having impact. And photography has so much impact. Using people’s voices through testimony has so much impact. And one has to believe that people are inherently good and they inherently care and that they can be moved when presented with these images. People in positions of influence. So that is a given in everything I’ve done. That this work will have an impact. It may have to be repeated again and again and again, multiplied by other practitioners in photography or human rights, but it will have an impact.”

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215 - Luca Locatelli Oct 11, 2023

Italian photographer Luca Locatelli describes himself as an environmental visual storyteller.

For more than a decade Luca has aimed to open a debate about the environment and our future with his work by synergizing art, science, and journalism to explore the world’s most promising solutions to the climate crisis. As an artist, Luca is concerned with trying to translate complex scientific data into visually engaging images and distribute them on social networks, in publications and at events.

His work has been published in international media such as National Geographic, The New York Times, and TIME. It has also been displayed in prominent global venues, including the Guggenheim Museum of New York, the Shangai Center of Photography, and others.

In addition, for over two years, Luca has been working on a significant and immersive cultural project about the Circular Economy with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is now an exhibition entitled The Circle at Gallerie D’Italia Museum of Turin, Italy, until February 2024.

Since 2004 Luca has been a founding partner of a non-governmental association that contributes to protect 600 thousand hectares of tropical forest in the Amazon.

In episode 215 Luca discusses, among other things:

How it started with a trip up the Amazon
Trying to do 2 things and failing
How he discovered a talent for generating good story ideas
Exploring his interest in ways that technology can help solve the environmental crisis
His project about food, Hunger Solutions
How he became interested in the circular economy
The End of Trash - Circular Economy Solutions
Stealing the idea of ‘Think Week’ from Bill Gates
How he thinks about his own carbon footprint
The problem of fast fashion
Developing economies
Future generations
Hopes that his work can have an impact
Creating ‘disorientation’ in the viewer
The hope of nature-based solutions

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“When we think about photography and changing the world we always think in one direction… we think that photography is about the last flood, about the last fire, the last tremendous things happening in the world with climate change. It’s not the only perspective. What if we can give to young people pictures that can show them solutions and a way of imagining and opening a debate about the future?”

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214 - The 1 Million Downloads Episode Sep 27, 2023

In episode 214:

An audio clip from each of the top 10 most downloaded episodes of all time (as of September 2023).

10 - Tom Craig (Episode 130)
09 - Martin Parr #2 (Episode 197)
08 - Tom Wood (Episode 160)
07 - Todd Hido (Episode 103)
06 - Chris Killip (Episode 094)05 - Paul Graham (Episode 149)
04 - Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb (Episode 105)
03 - Stephen Shore (Episode 192)
02 - Mark Steinmetz (Episode 112)
01 - Martin Parr (Episode 091)

And a swift tour of the Bonus Questions which all guests now answer for the member-only podcast:

What has photography taught you about yourself or life in general?
What is your greatest strength and your main weakness as a photographer?
If you could meet your 20 year-old self now, what advice would you give to her/him?
What’s the one most essential lesson you would pass on to someone considering a photography ‘career’ today?
How has a failure, or what seemed like a failure at the time, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favourite failure” of yours?
Can you think of any ideas or beliefs - whether about photography or anything else in life - that you have now reversed or totally changed your position on?
Is there a photobook that has a special place in your heart or a particular significance, or that has been especially influential or inspiring to you?
Do you have a favourite photographer, if you absolutely had to pick someone? Why them?
Are there any notable photobooks or photographers that you have only just discovered for the first time in recent years?
If and when you feel creatively exhausted, uninspired or blocked what do you do to get yourself moving forward again?
How do you deal with self doubt if and when it arises? Do you have any strategies or habits that you come back to?
What other artforms or cultural output, either highbrow or popular, do you consume, enjoy or take inspiration from?
What is the thing you like most about photography or about being a photographer? What is the thing you like the least?
How do you deal with juggling the need to make a living with finding time to pursue personal projects that don’t necessarily earn you any money?
How do you manage a work/life balance and deal with juggling career with relationship/home/family life?
What do you think you might have ended up doing if you hadn’t become a photographer and would you have been good at it?
What are you hopes for the future?

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213 - Ian Berry Sep 13, 2023

Ian Berry was born in 1934 in Lancashire, England. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, and his photographs were used in the trial to prove the victims' innocence.

Henri Cartier-Bresson invited Ian to join Magnum in 1962, when he was based in Paris. He moved to London in 1964 to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. Since then assignments have taken him around the world: he has documented Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia; conflicts in Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and the Congo; famine in Ethiopia; and apartheid in South Africa. The major body of work produced in South Africa is represented in two of his books: Black and Whites: L'Afrique du Sud and Living Apart (1996).
Important editorial assignments have included work for National Geographic, Fortune, Stern, Geo, national Sunday magazines, Esquire, Paris-Match and Life. Berry has also reported on the political and social transformations in China and the former USSR. Recent projects have involved tracing the route of the Silk Road through Turkey, Iran and southern Central Asia to northern China for Conde Nast Traveler, photographing Berlin for a Stern supplement, the Three Gorges Dam project in China for the Telegraph Magazine, Greenland for a book on climate control and child slavery in Africa.

Ian’s recent book, Water (GOST Books, 2022), brings together many classic images from Ian’s extensive archive with material shot over the course of 15 years travelling the globe to document the inextricable links between landscape, life and water. This new book brings together a selection of the resulting images which collectively tell the story of man’s complex relationship with water — at a time when climate change demonstrates just how precariously water and life are intertwined.

In episode 213, Ian discusses, among other things:

How all the pics in Water came to be used as B&W
How the project came about
How he got into photography
How he came to be the only photographer at the Sharpeville Massacre
The importance of luck
Getting into Magnum after a tea with HCB and a disasterous first meeting
Changes in Magnum over the years - and photography in general
The controversy over David Allan Harvey and the subsequent action by Magnum
Everything being ‘too woke’
Learining from other people and looking at contact sheets

Referenced:

Website | Instgram

“I brought along my contact sheets which Henri spent ages going through. And he said ‘great, good to have you’. And I went back upstairs afterwards and they said ‘fine, you’re in Magnum.’ And that was it…”

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212 - Benjamin Rasmussen Aug 30, 2023

Benjamin Rasmussen is a Faroese/American photographer living in Denver, Colorado.

After growing up in the Philippines and studying photography at Ateneo de Manila University, he moved to the United States to explore contemporary American identity. His practice is research and photography based and centers on the intersection of law, history and sociology.

Benjamin works for magazines including Time, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He is also the founder of Pattern, an exhibition and educational space in Denver, Colorado that works to spark dialogue and acts as a meeting place for the art and documentary worlds.

Benjamin’s debut photobook, The Good Citizen, which explores how American society came to be what it is today, was published last year by GOST books.

In episode 212, Benjamin discusses, among other things:

His origin story growing up in the Philipines and then moving to the USA for college
Growing up amidst his family’s deeply religious roots
By The Olive Trees project
Faroese hunting pilot whales - story
Faroe islands being too picturesque
The dark side of his American family
The origins of The Good Citizen project
The five chapter structure of the book
Book banning in the USA
Trump
His optimism re. photojournalism
The implications of AI

Referenced:

“I’ve survived largely off editiorial commissions for the past 10-15 years. It’s been really interesting.You have a lot more complex voices who are involved even in my short history of it. The reality is that in my entire career rates haven’t changed. It’s getting increasingly difficult to survive financially, but I think in terms of the conversations that are happening it’s gotten so much more interesting. ”

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211 - Yelena Yemchuk Aug 16, 2023

Yelena Yemchuk's output as a visual artist is immediately recognizable, regardless of medium. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Yelena immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was eleven. She became interested in photography when her father gave her a 35mm Minolta camera for her fourteenth birthday.
Yelena went on to study art at Parsons in New York and photography at Art Center in Pasadena. Yelena has exhibited paintings, films and photography at galleries and museums worldwide. She has shot for the New Yorker, New York Times, Another, ID, Vogue, and others.
Yelena released her first book Gidropark, published by Damiani in April 2011, followed by Anna Maria, published by United Vagabonds in September 2017. Yelena had her first institutional debut with her project Mabel, Betty & Bette, a photography and video work at the Dallas Contemporary Museum. A monograph with the same title was released by Kominek Books in March 2021. Her newest book Odesa was released in May 2022, by Gost Books.

In episode 211, Yelena discusses, among other things:

The relevance of her book to the current war
The “immigrant parent bullshit story”
Moving to New York
The influence of her uncle and her dad’s best friend
Discovering her calling at art school doing photography
Her early career success, including working with Smashing Pumpkins
Returning to Ukraine in 1990
Gidropark project
Deciding to focus on her personal work
Mabel, Betty & Bette
YYY, published by Depart pour l’image
Odessa being “love at first sight”
Deciding to focus on the youth
Forthcoming book, Milanka

“It was very clear to me that I needed to tell the story of these people. Not just the cadets, but the story of the people in Odesa. And it was like an urgency. I wanted to go back all the time. If i didn’t have kids I probably would have just stayed there. I couldn’t get enough… I was going back and forth. I couldn’t stop. I had to tell this story. I had to shoot these people. It was like a romance. It was like I had a lover over there.”

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210 - Moises Saman Aug 02, 2023

Moises Saman is widely considered to be one of the leading documentary and conflict photographers of his generation and has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 2014. His work has largely focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Moises was born in Lima, Peru, from a mixed Spanish and Peruvian family and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He studied Communications and Sociology in the United States at California State University, graduating in 1998. It was during his last year in university that Moises first became interested in becoming a photographer, influenced by the work of a number of photojournalists that had been covering the wars in the Balkans.

After graduating, Moises moved to New York City to complete a summer internship at New York Newsday and joined as a Staff Photographer, a position he held until 2007. During his 7 years at Newsday Moises' work focused on covering the fallout of the 9/11 attacks, spending most of his time traveling between Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries. In the Autumn of 2007 Moises left Newsday to become a freelance photographer represented by Panos Pictures. During that time he become a regular contributor for The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, Newsweek, and TIME Magazine, among other international publications.

Over the years Moises' work has received awards from the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year and the Overseas Press Club and his photographs have been shown in a several exhibitions worldwide. In 2015 Moises received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work.

In 2011, Moises relocated to Cairo, Egypt, where he was based for three years while covering the Arab Spring for The New York Times and other publications, mainly The New Yorker. His first book, Discordia, on which he colloaborated with artist Daria Birang, documents the tumultuous transitions that have taken place in the region. The work featured in Discordia has received numerous awards, including the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund.

Moises’s latest book, Glad Tidings of Benevolence, was published earlier this year by GOST books to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. It brings together Moises’s photographs taken in Iraq during this period and the following years, with documents and texts relating to the war. Exploring the construction—through image and language—of competing narratives of the war, the book represents the culmination of Moises’s twenty years of work across Iraq.

Moises currently lives in Amman, Jordan with his wife and their young daughter.

In episode 210, Moises discusses, among other things:

The catalyst that was 9/11
Newsday
His introduction to photography via his studie in sociology
The Balkans conflict
Learning the ropes in Afghanistan
How his attitude towards photojournalism evolved over time
The impact of spending eight days in Abu Ghraib prison
Surviving a helicopter crash
The myth of objectivity
Trying to show a more nuanced picture
Every day life continuing amidst war
“The framing of the frame”
Covering The Arab Spring
Collaborating with artist Daria Birang on Discordia
Facts, truth and questioning
Victim vs. perpetrator
His current project in Amman

Referenced:

“One thing I’ve realised is, at least for me, that perhaps this other approach to the work, the one that’s a little bit quieter and more nuanced, more human really, where you’re also celebrating humanity rather than the lack thereof in this very difficult context, that perhaps is a little more effective. I like to think that.

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209 - Trish Morrissey Jul 19, 2023

Much of the work of Dublin-born Irish photographer Trish Morrissey is a study of the language of photography through still and moving images, using performance and wit as tools to investigate the boundaries of photographic meaning. Although most of Trish’s work features her as the protagonist, she does not consider the photographs to be self portraits per se, though they can be read that way. She uses humour as a tool to disarm the viewer, hoping it wil then evaporate, leaving a slow burning psychologically tense afterglow. Weaving fact and fiction, Trish plunges into the heart of such issues as family experiences and national identities, feminine and masculine roles, and relationships between strangers.

Her work has been exhibited widely, including in the shows ‘Landscape, Portrait: Now and Then’ at the Hestercombe Gallery in 2021; ‘Who’s Looking at the family now?’ at the London Art Fair 2019 and in the solo show ‘Trish Morrissey: A certain slant of light’ at the Francesca Maffeo Gallery in 2018 and most recently in 2022 he exhibition Trish Morrissey, Autofictions; Twenty Years of Photography and Film, at Serlachius Museum Gustaf, Finland.

Her work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The National Media Museum, Bradford and the Wilson Centre for Photography, London and was published in 2022 in the book Autofictions to coincide with the aforementioned exhibition in Finland.

In episode 209, Trish discusses, among other things:

Her recent retrospective and book
The Front project
Her parents family album
Reading pictures from body language
Her collaborative project with her daughter
The performative side of her practice
A Certain Slant of Light
Exploring the female experience
Early life
Residency in Australia
Working with video

Referenced:

Andy Grundberg
Zed Nelson
Nicholas Nixon, Brown Sisters
Kate Best
Mark Harriott
Hilary Mantel
Diane Arbus

“Everything I’ve done, when I’ve looked back on it I’ve realised is actually trying things on. It’s kind of like a way of rehearsing for the future…”

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208 - Curran Hatleberg Jul 05, 2023

Curran Hatleberg is an American photographer based in Baltimore, MD. He attended Yale University and graduated in 2010 with an MFA. Influenced by the American tradition of road photography, Curran’s process entails driving throughout the United States and interacting with various strangers in different locales. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at the Whitney Biennial, MASS MoCA, the International Center of Photography, Rencontres d’Arles, Higher Pictures and Fraenkel Gallery. He is the recipient of various grants, prizes and awards including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. Curran’s work is held in various museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work has been published frequently in periodicals such as Harpers, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vice and The Paris Review. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016. His second monograph, River's Dream, was published by TBW Books in 2022. Curran has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Yale University and Cooper Union.

In episode 208, Curran discusses, among other things:

Coming from a big family
His background in painting
The benefits of taking a break from education
‘Stumbling’ into an MFA at Yale
His first book The Lost Coast
His process and saying yes to everything
Being open and vulnerable to what might happen
The fascination with the USA
Trying to convey the ‘atmospheric intensity’ of Florida in Summer
How he decides where to stop and photograph
The ‘origin story’ of lending his van and trailer to a stranger
His artist’s book, Double Rainbow
Being guided by reading fiction

Referenced:

“I hate this idea that’s so grounded in the myth of road photographers, or American photography, where it’s this fallacy about the singular genius of the person bending the world to their will. It just seems so absurd to me. Chance is everything. I’m constantly levelled by how little control I have when I’m working. I feel insignificant and almost powerless a lot of the time.”

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207 - Bertrand Meunier Jun 21, 2023

French photographer Bertrand Meunier has spent most of the past three decades quietly working either editorially or on personal long-term documentary projects both internationally and, in more recent years, at home in France. He worked extensively in Pakistan and Afghanistan among other places, primarily for Newsweek magazine, but much of his time has been spent in China documenting the tumultuous social and economic changes that the population has been faced with, focussing in particular on the economic decline of the large industrial cities, and the consequences for the people living in them. In 2001 he won the Leica Oskar Barnack prize for the work from China and in 2005 published a book, The Blood of China, When Silence Kills, in collaboration with Pierre Haski. In 2007, Bertrand won the annual Niépce prize.

A more comprehensive and definitive collection of the work from China has just been published as a book by EXB Editions entitled Erased and a corresponding solo exhibition of the work is currently on show at theMusée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon sur Saône until September 17th 2023 and will subsequently be shown at the museum of photography Charleroi, Belgium from 30 September 2023 to 28 January 2024.

Bertrand is currently finalizing the editing of his documentary film shot in a French prison and entitled Conversations. And he has recently obtained a creation grant in Luxembourg to work on a new documentary film about an open psychiatry centre.

Bertrand lives in Paris with his partner Juliette and is a member of the Tendance Fleue collective.

In episode 207, Bertrand discusses, among other things:

Photography as a language
His previous life as a professional climber
How he began his longstanding relationship with China
Current book and exhibition: Erased
His biggest achievement in China
Memory
His project on his dad and family
Being ‘lost’ trying to shoot in France
The importance of teaching people to read photoographs
The ‘reverse angle’
His forthcoming documentary about prisoners: Conversations
His work on psychiatric facility in Luxembourg
Applying for grants
Passion

Referenced:

Website

“Photography is like rock climbing, yeah, you have to focus, but if you do it to make a living? It’s a bad way to make a living. You do it because it’s a passion. It’s your life.”

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206 - Chico Review 2023 Special Jun 07, 2023

Featuring:

Website | Instagram

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205 - Photo London 2023 Special May 24, 2023

Featuring:

Martin Parr (Ep. 91 & 197)
Dr. Claire Hyman
Tracy Marshall Grant
Chris Dorley Brown (Ep. 97)
James Hyman
Simon Roberts (Ian Parry Photojournalsim Grant) (Ep. 43)
Michael Benson
Jillian Edelstein (KIckstarter) (Ep. 87)
Gideon Mendel (Ep. 40)
Alex Schneiderman

Website | Instagram

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204 - Ivor Prickett May 10, 2023

After taking a degree in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, Ivor Prickett began working in Europe and the Middle East, striving to convey and denounce the effects of war on the civilian population – on the people whose lives it ravages and uproots, whatever side they may be on. Initially focused on the private, domestic sphere of war’s long-term social and humanitarian consequences, Ivor’s gaze has shifted over the years towards places of forced migration and lands where people seek refuge, and then to the front lines of combat zones.

His early projects focused on stories of displaced people throughout the Balkans and Caucasus. Based in the Middle East since 2009, Ivor documented the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, working simultaneously on editorial assignments and his own long term projects. In 2012 he was selected for the World Press Photo Joop swart Masterclass, named as a FOAM Talent and selected by PDN for their 30 under 30 list.

Travelling to more than ten countries between 2012 and 2015 Ivor documented the Syrian refugee crisis in the region as well as Europe, working closely in collaboration with UNHCR to produce a comprehensive study of the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history.

Most recently Ivor’s work has focused on the fight to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Ultimately working exclusively for the The New York Times he spent months on the ground, particularly covering the Battle of Mosul, reporting in both words and pictures. His work in Iraq and Syria has earned him multiple World Press Photo Awards and in 2018 he was named as a Pulitzer finalist. The entire body of work titled End of the Caliphate was released as a book by renowned German publisher Steidl in June 2019.

Ivor’s work has been recognised through a number of prestigious awards including The World Press Photo, The Pulitzer Prizes, The Overseas Press Club Awards, Pictures of the Year International, The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and The Ian Parry Scholarship. Most recently he was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet 2019 cycle and his work is currently touring the globe as part of the group exhibition.

His pictures have been exhibited widely at institutions such as The Victoria and Albert Museum, Sothebys, Foam Gallery and The National Portrait Gallery, London and he currently has a major solo show at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, In conjunction with the 2023 Fotografia Europea festival, for which the theme is Europe Matters: Visions of a Restless Identity. Ivor’s show and the corresponding book is entitled No Home from War: Tales of Survival and Loss and features over fifty photographs taken in conflict zones from 2006 to 2022. It is the the largest show of Ivor’s work to date, the first in italy, and it will be up until 30th July 2023.

Ivor is represented by Panos Pictures in London and he is a European Canon Ambassador.

In episode 203, Ivor discusses, among other things:

His route to Newport and what he got from going there.
How he got started and his strategy to get his work seen.
Arab Spring 2011 and the lessons learned from that.
Branching out and needing to get closer to the source.
Mosul.
The NYT and being asked to write.
Going through times of wanting to quit.
What keeps him doing it.
Is an art gallery the right place for photojournalism?
Can your work have an impact?
Ukraine.
Processing the witnessing of horror and adjusting to normal life.
AI and its implications for photojournalism.

Referenced:

Christine Redmond
Joe Stirling
Ken Grant
Clive Landon
Cheryl Newman
Tim Hetherington
Chris Hondros
David Furst

Website | Instagram

“By the time it came to the ISIS work in Iraq and Syria, it was almost like I wanted to get closer to the source myself and see up close what it was I’d been investigating all these years and what people had been running from. Maybe it was a personal fascination that led me there to a certain extent, but also Mosul was essentially a humanitarian crisis as much as a war, and that’s why I went in the first place. ”

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203 - Stacy Kranitz Apr 26, 2023

Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict.

Stacy was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (2017), a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020), a Puffin Foundation grant (2022), and a Center for Documentation Fellowship (2023). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015), the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022) and the Tennessee Triennial (2023) Her photographs are in several public collections including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke Universities, Archive of Documentary Arts. Stacy works as an assignment photographer for such publications as Time, National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) To Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022 and was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award.

In episode 202, Stacy discusses, among other things:

Her ‘awful’ childhood
Her interest in the grey areas
Violence as catharsis
Why she was dissatisfied with her early work…
…and what she did about it
How she ‘accidentally’ ended up living in her car for 3.5 years
Blurring her professional and personal lives
How she came to work in Appalachia
The title of her book, As it Was Give(n) To Me
The mythology of Daniel Boone
Why she included self-portraits in the book
Playing with stereotypes and representation in her images
Her grant writing endeavours
Her next project in Appalachia
The challenges of editing the book
The long term nature of her projects

Referenced:

Harry Cottle
The FSA
Jack Woody

Website | Instagram

“The camera for me is a connector. It connects me to people. And I always knew that if I hadn’t been a photographer, especially an editorial photographer where you’re sent out to all these different places, that I would be a very unhealthy hermit and I would just wither away. (Which isn’t even logical, but that’s how I felt). So the camera is a lifeline for me.”

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202 - Igor Posner Apr 12, 2023

Igor Posner was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). After the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to California in the early 90s. He studied molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he first started to take pictures and experiment in the darkroom.
Initial infatuation with picture-taking led Igor to explore the silent and haunting experience of walking after dark on the streets of Los Angeles and Tijuana. In a collision between social and typical with personal and psychological, this first series of images “Nonesuch Records” savors the strange solitude of the enigmatic region between California and Mexico; amid the streets, bars, night shelter hotels, and disappearing nocturnal figures.
After 14 years, Igor returned to St. Petersburg in 2006, taking up photography full time, which led to his first book Past Perfect Continuous, published by Red Hook Editions in 2017.
In 2022, Igor published his second monograph, entitled, Cargó. The book is a visual exloration of psychological aspects of migration and the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods based on immigrant communities in North America.
Igor is currently based in New York and in 2021 he joined Brooklyn-based independent publishing company Red Hook Editions as a managing partner.
Igor’s work has been shown in North America, Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia and he has been a member of Prospekt Photographers since 2011.

In episode 202, Igor discusses, among other things:

Growing up in St. Petersburg
Moving to the USA
Being gifted a camera by his mother
The New York Photo League
Shooting in LA
The ‘language’ he employs intuitively
Returning to Russia
First attempts at editing being a ‘total failure’
Brighton Beach and his second book, Cargo.
The themes associated with the book
Commercial work
Social media

Referenced:

Anders Petersen
Michael Ackerman
Antoine D’agata
Robert Frank
Jason Eskenazi

Website | Instagram

“All I wanted to do was go out there and be on the street and just photograph. It was an incredible sense of freedom and liberation for the first time in my life of not going from point A to point B. That’s what photography gives you because you have to be open to everything that’s around you. All of a sudden I started just looking at things. That’s a very trivial thing to say, but to me it felt like something I’ve never experienced before or at least not since my early childhood.”

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201 - Antoine D'Agata Mar 29, 2023

Antoine D'Agata is a French photographer and film director and a full member of Magnum Photos. His photographic subjects have mostly been those on the fringes of society and his work deals with topics often considered taboo, such as addiction, sex, personal obsessions, darkness, and prostitution.

Born in Marseilles in 1961, Antoine left France in his early 20s and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. During his time in New York, Antoine worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum Photos, but after his return to France in 1993, he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte, and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001, he published Hometown and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.

Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world. He is currently based in Paris.

In episode 201, Antoine discusses, among other things:

Wanting to become a priest at 15
Sacrifice
Moving to London
Situationism
His intro to photography before he took pictures
Being accepted into the ICP as a ’social experiment’
Being ‘ashamed’ of having left the street
Critics not having the full facts
Moments of Paroxsysm
The question for morality and ethics
Quitting photography for 4-5 years
Cambodia, his book Ice, Crystal Meth and the consequences of using it
How he manages to endure the banality of the real world
Contamination
His Covid project with a heat sensitive camera
His commitment to and passion for teaching workshops

Referenced:

Luc Delahaye
Moises Saman

Instagram

“I didn’t want to betray in any way what I was or what I was doing, so I needed to find different ways to keep going without negating what I believed in, and photography seemed to be the only considerable way to do it…”

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200 - Emma Hardy Mar 15, 2023

Based in London, Emma Hardy is well practiced in capturing the nuances of everyday life. Her images reflect an often unnoticed drama behind the scenes. Coming from a theatrical background and having worked as an actress herself before focusing on photography, Emma cites her fascination with people’s behaviour, the tensions, interactions and quirky humour, as a driving energy in her work.

Mainly self-taught, Emma photographs on film, simply, with natural or available light, stating “I try not to impose much technique or too much of myself on my subjects.” As such, there’s a hallmark honesty to her work. Her images are infused with a believable sense of being, her portraits are intimate and unselfconscious. Tilda Swinton, Natalia Vodianova, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender and Stella McCartney have sat for her, among others.

She started photographing portraits, documents and fashion for British Vogue, The Telegraph magazine, Vanity Fair, The Fader, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, among many others, and had her first solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 with a project titled Exceptional Youth. Other exhibitions in London, New York and Milan followed, and she was invited to photograph a series of portraits for the London 2012 Olympics, again featured at the National Portrait Gallery. Thirty-nine of her portraits are in the permanent collection at the NPG London. In 2012 she was commissioned by Oxfam & The Economist to travel to Cambodia to document the citizens of Phnom Penh who were battling the governments land grabs—this series became an exhibition in London in 2013 titled Losing Ground, the exhibition travelled to Washington DC where the images were used as a lobbying tool to help the Cambodian situation onto the G8 summit list.

Permissions, Emma’s first monograph, was published by Gost Books in November 2022. Some of the images were exhibited at 1014 Gallery in Dalston, London, December 2022 - January 2023.

Describing her aesthetic as raw but tender, Emma finds beauty in imperfection, and polish in the detail of everyday life. And through her lens, the most ordinary moments seem steeped in romance and intrigue, as if her subjects are characters in a movie playing in her head.

On episode 200, Emma discusses, among other things:

Is art more pure if it’s done for the joy of it?
Beauty and lyricism
Childhood feelings of being an outsider
Taking pictures of her children from an early age
Trying to transmit how she felt in her work
The inclusion of still lifes of flowers
Why she started to photograph her mum
The issue of permission and consent
How the way she shot changed over time

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“When things line up, when life or the universe says ‘I’ve got something I can show you. Are you ready? ARE you ready?’ And you might be ready, and you might catch this thing that is shown to you. And that’s incredibly beautiful. And the times that that has happened I was very aware of it. Like, my whole body started fizzing.”

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199 - Nick Brandt Mar 01, 2023

Nick Brandt’s photographic series always relate to the devastating impact that humankind is having on both the rapidly disappearing natural world and now on itself, as a result of environmental destruction, climate change and human actions.
In the East African trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across The Ravaged Land(2001-2012), Nick established a style of portrait photography of animals in the wild similar to that of humans in a studio setting, shooting on medium format film, and attempting to portray animals as sentient creatures not so different from us.
In Inherit the Dust(2016), Nick photographed in places in East Africa where the animals used to roam. In each location, life size panels of unreleased animal portrait photographs were erected, setting the panels within a world of explosive human development. It is not just the animals who are the victims in this out of control world, but also the humans.
Photographed in color, This Empty World(2019) addresses the escalating destruction of the East African natural world at the hands of humans, showing a world where, overwhelmed by runaway development, there is no longer space for animals to survive. The people in the photos are also often helplessly swept along by the relentless tide of ‘progress’. Each image is a combination of two moments in time shot from the exact same camera position, once with wild animals that enter the frame, after which a set is built and a cast of people drawn from local communities.
The Day May Break (2021) is the first part of a global series portraying people & animals impacted by environmental destruction. Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya, the people in the photos have all been badly affected by climate change - displaced by cyclones that destroyed their homes, displaced & impoverished after years-long severe droughts. The photos were taken at 5 sanctuaries/conservancies. The animals are almost all long-term rescues, due to everything from poaching of their parents to habitat destruction & poisoning. These animals can never be released back into the wild. Now habituated, it was therefore safe for strangers to be photographed close to the animals in the same frame.
Nick has had solo gallery and museum shows around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles. All the series are published in book form. Born and raised in London, where he originally studied Painting and Film, Nick now lives in the southern Californian mountains. In 2010, Nick co-founded Big Life Foundation, a non-profit in Kenya/Tanzania employing more than 300 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli/Kilimanjaro ecosystem.

On episode 199, Nick discusses, among other things:

Why he moved to the USA
His 18 ‘wasted’ years making films
His first trilogy of projects: On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across The Ravaged Land
Having a niche that enabled him to start making a living
Only taking photographs to exist on prints
Inherit the Dust
Going in to each project both ‘excited and scared shitless’
This Empty World
The Day May Break
How he was personally impacted by wild fires at home in California
The story of Kuda and Sky II
His level of optimism about climate change

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“Every project I go into I have no bloody clue whether it’s gonna work. But, that is part of the buzz, by which I mean I like to go into each project excited and scared shitless. I find that challenge to be incredibly stimulating.”

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198 - Gregory Crewdson Feb 15, 2023

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson’s images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992–97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14). Beneath the Roses (2003–08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.

Crewdson’s emblematic series Twilight (1998–2002) ushers the viewer into a nocturnal arena of alienation and desire that is at once forbidding and darkly magnetic. In these lush photographs, the elements intervene unexpectedly and alarmingly into suburban domestic space. Crewdson’s psychological realism is tempered in these images by their heightened theatricality, while themes of memory and imagination, the banal and the fantastic, function in concert with a narrative of pain and redemption that runs through American history and its picturing.

Cathedral of the Pines, which was first exhibited at Gagosian in New York in 2016, depicts unnamed figures situated in the forests around the town of Becket, Massachusetts. In scenes that evoke nineteenth-century American and European history paintings, the works’ subjects appear traumatized by mysterious events or suspended in a fugue state. Working with a small crew to maintain an intimate and immediate atmosphere, the artist also used people close to him as models. But even once we know who “plays” the protagonists, their actions remain cryptic and their relationships unclear. “There are no answers here,” states the artist, “only questions.” The 2018–19 series An Eclipse of Moths is set amid down-at-heel postindustrial locations including an abandoned factory and a disused taxi depot. They serve as backdrops for Crewdson’s enigmatic dramas of decay and potential rebirth.

Gregory’s most recent body of work, Eveningside (2021-2022), was shot in B&W and formed the centrepiece of a retrospective trilogy of work, alongside Cathedral of the Pines and An Eclipse of Moths, in a major exhibition at Galerie D’Italia in Turin from October 2022 until January 2023. A older series called Fireflies (1996) was also included as ‘both connective tissue and counterpoint…’. A book, also entitled Eveningside, was published to accompany the show.

On episode 198, Gregory discusses, among other things:

The three phases of his creative process
Why he chose B&W for Eveningside
His transition from film to digital
The abiding themes in his work
How every artist has one story to tell
Falling in love with photography from day one
His love of movies
The significance of nudity in his work
Allowing for ‘a certain kind of unexpected beauty and mystery’ to come out of the process
Windows
Never being quite satisfied with the results
The relationship between true beauty and sadness
The act of making a picture being an act of seperation from the world
The way in which the subjects of his work always seem disconnected and alone…
And how that references the act of making the picture.

Referenced

Gallery | Instagram

“I’ve said many times, I feel like every artist has one story to tell and that central story is told through an artists lifetime, and when you come of age in your early twenties you’re confronted with movies and artwork that you love or you hate and you’re defined in a certain way as a kind of aesthetic being, and then you spend your life sort of working out those things, and trying to find yourself within that frame of influences.”

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197 - Martin Parr (#2) Feb 01, 2023

Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952), the man who the Daily Telegraph declared to be, “arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer” is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.

His major projects have been rural communities (1975–1982), The Last Resort (1983–1985), The Cost of Living (1987–1989), Small World (1987–1994) and Common Sense (1995–1999). Since 1994, Martin has been a member of Magnum Photos, where he scraped in by one vote and where between 2013 and 2017 he served as President. His work has been published in numerous photobooks, over 120 of his own, and he has exhibited prolifically throughout his career.

In 2017 the Martin Parr Foundation was opened in Bristol. The MPF is as a gallery and archive and research resource dedicated to both preserving the Martin’s photographic legacy and to supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on the British Isles.

Since his first A Small Voice appearance on Episode 91 of the podcast in October 2018, Martin has had a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which opened in March 2019. Entitled Only Human, the show included portraits from around the world, with a special focus on Britishness, explored through a series of projects that investigated British identity. Also since that episode Martin was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in June, 2021.

Martin’s latest book, A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village was released in September 2022 by RRB Books.

On episode 197, Martin discusses, among other things:

Influence of his methodist grandfather… and peers at Manchester
Early experiences in Hebdon Bridge
The move to Ireland - From the Pope to a Flat White
Liverpool and the controversy around The Last Resort work
Bristol and Bath - The Cost of Living
Being blown away by his first experience of Arles
Joining Magnum amidst disapproval from the old guard
Small World
A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village
Signs of the Times
Common Sense
The work of the Martin Parr Foundation
Good work and bad work

Referenced:

Robert Doisneau
Bill Brandt
Robert Frank
Garry Winogrand
Alan Murgatroyd
Brian Griffin
Daniel Meadows
Albert Street Workshop
Fintan O’Toole
Peter Fraser
Peter Mitchell
Tom Wood
Anna Fox
Ken Grant
David Moore
John Hinde
Philip Jones Griffiths
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Boris Mikhailov
Krass Clement

Martin: Website | Instagram | Episode 91 | Chew Stoke book
MPF: Website | Instagram

“Most of the pictures I take are very bad, because to get the good pictures is almost impossible. If you went out in the morning and said ‘today I’m only gonna take good pictures’ you wouldn’t get anywhere. You wouldn’t even start. So you’ve got to have that momentum of shooting, and you’ve got to have found the right subject, the right place, the right time, and then things will start to happen.”

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196 - Eugene Richards Jan 18, 2023

Photographer, writer, and filmmaker, Eugene Richards,was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he studied photography with Minor White. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called” War on Poverty.” Following a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, Eugene helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, which reported on black political action as well as the Ku Klux Klan. Photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.

Upon returning to Dorchester, Eugene began to document the changing, racially diverse neighborhood where he was born. After being invited to join Magnum Photos in 1978, he worked increasingly as a freelance magazine photographer, undertaking assignments on such diverse topics as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging and death in America. In 1992, he directed and shot Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, the first of seven short films he would eventually make.

Eugene has authored sixteen books and his photographs have been collected into three comprehensive monographs. Exploding Into Life, which chronicles his first wife Dorothea Lynch’s struggle with breast cancer, received Nikon's Book of the Year award. For Below The Line: Living Poor in America, his documentation of urban and rural poverty, Eugene received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room received an Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, an extensive reportorial on the effects of hardcore drug usage, received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books. That same year, Americans We was the recipient of the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book. In 2005, Pictures of the Year International chose The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photographic essays, Best Book of the year. Eugene’s most recent books include The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses in rural America; War Is Personal, an assessment in words and pictures of the human consequences of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a remembrance of life on the Arkansas Delta.

Eugene has won just about every major award that exists for documentary photography including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, among many others.

His new self-published book, In This Brief Life, due for release in September 2023, features over fifty years of mostly unseen photographs, from his earliest pictures of sharecropper life in the Arkansas Delta throughout his lifetime as a photographer.

On episode 196, Eugene discusses, among other things:

The recent political landscape in the USA.
In This Brief Life - his forthcoming, Kickstarter funded book.
Why he self-publishes books.
His change of heart about the value of Instagram
Why going through his archive was an ‘obsessive experience’
Being ‘out of touch with what journalism is’
The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room
Tips on getting to know people on a story
Below The Line: Living Poor in America
The Blue Room
Returning to Arkansas
Documentary project Thy Kingom Come
Cemetery project
Exploding Into Life
Many Voices
Why he left Magnum

Referenced:

Ed Barnes
Peter Howe
Eugene Smith Award
Dorothea Lynch
Cornell Capa
John Morris
Howard Chapnick
Jim Hughes, Camera Arts
Minor White
Roy DeCarava
Walker Evans
FSA
Bill Brandt
William Klein
Mike Nichols
Terence Malick
Koudelka
Leonard Freed
Reni Burri
Mary Ellen Mark
Nachtwey
Salgado

Website | Instagram| New book

“You’re sitting there with thirty or forty contacts books all over the floor, and you find yourself staying up late into the night thinking ‘there has to be something there’ and finding nothing at all. And the people on Instagram write to you and say, ‘oh my God, I’d love to look at your contact sheets’ and I tell them quite honestly, probably not, because they’re gonna disappoint the shit out of you!”

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195 - Aaron Schuman Jan 04, 2023

Aaron Schuman is an American photographer, writer, curator and educator based in the UK. He received a BFA in Photography and History of Art from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999, and an MA in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of London: London Consortium at Birkbeck College in 2003.

Aaron is the author of several critically-acclaimed monographs: Sonata, published by Mack in the summer of 2022; Slant, published by Mack, which was cited as one of 2019's "Best Photobooks" by numerous photographers, critics and publications, and Folk, published by NB Books, which also was cited as one of 2016's "Best Photobooks" by numerous people, and was long-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2017. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in many public and private collections.

In addition to to his own photographic work, Aaron has contributed essays, interviews, texts and photographs to many other books and monographs. He has also written and photographed for a wide variety of journals, magazines and publications, such as Aperture, Foam, ArtReview, Frieze, Magnum Online, Hotshoe, The British Journal of Photography and more.

Aaron has curated several major international festivals and exhibitions, was the founder and editor of the online photography journal, SeeSaw Magazine (2004-2014) and is Associate Professor in Photography and Visual Culture, and the founder and Programme Leader of the MA/Masters in Photography programme, at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).

On episode 195, Aaron discusses, among other things:

SeeSaw Magazine
How he fell into curating…
…And then teaching
Early interest in documentary photography
Writing to Richard Avedon
Takeaways from working for Annie Leibowitz
Impact of Wolgang Tilmans Turner Prize show…
…And the experience of printing for him
How his writing had an important influence on his photography
Getting the balance back
First book, Folk
Slant
Sonata - trying to see the world through clear, fresh eyes

Referenced:

Richard Avedon
Annie Leibowitz
Wolgang Tilmans
Cartier Bresson
Bruce Davidson

“I’m not interested in necessarily making explicitly autobiographical work in a kind of diaristic sense, but I am interested in infusing what I do with something that’s coming from me. It’s a question I ask my students all the time, you know, ‘this is a really good idea for a project but why are you the person to make this project? What do you have to bring to this?’ Because, yes, the subject matter itself might be compelling but if you’re just doing it in the way that I did with the Tibetan monks, that it’s been done a million times before, it’s not addding anything to the culture - we already have those pictures.”

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194 - The Year In Review 2022 Dec 21, 2022

Featuring:

Alison McCauley
Robert Gumpert
Mimi Plumb
Peter Fraser
Eva Voutsaki
Jem Southam
Patrick Brown
Alba Zari
Pradip Malde
Lewis Bush
Greg Williams
Joanne Coates
Rich Joseph-Facun
Sam Jones
Bryan Schutmaat
Kavi Pujara
Ben Brody
Anastasia Samoylova
Stephen Shore
Paddy Summerfield

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193 - Paddy Summerfield Dec 07, 2022

Paddy Summerfield (born 1947) is a British fine art photographer who has lived and worked in Oxford in the UK all his life. Paddy is known for his evocative series’ of black and white images, shot on 35mm film, which co-opt the traditional genre of documentary photography to realise a more personal and inward looking vision. He has said his photographs are exclusively about abandonment and loss.

After taking an Art Foundation course at the Oxford Polytechnic, Summerfield attended Guildford School of Art, studying firstly in the Photography Department, then joining the Film department the following year. In 1967, when still a first-year student, he made photographs that appeared in 1970 in Bill Jay's magazine Album. Between 1968 and 1978, Paddy documented Oxford University students in the summer terms. His pictures published in Creative Camera, and on its cover in January 1974, were recognised as psychological and expressionist, unusual in an era of journalistic and documentary photography. Throughout his life, Paddy has focused on making photographic essays that are personal documents. From 1997 to 2007 he photographed his parents, his mother with Alzheimer's disease and his father caring for her. A book of the work entitled Mother and Father was published by Dewi Lewis, as have been all of Paddy’s other books: Empty Days, The Holiday Pictures, Home Movie and The Oxford Pictures.

Next Spring there will be an exhibition at North Wall as part of the Photo Oxford Festival (April 18 - 7 May 2023) of Pictures From The Garden a project in which seven photographers - Vanessa Winship, Alys Tomlinson, Matthew Finn, Nik Roche, Sian Davey, Jem Southam and Alex Schneideman - have made work in response to Paddy’s Mother and Father project, with a corresponding book published by, of course, Dewi Lewis.

On episode 193, Paddy discusses, among other things:

The current Pictures From The Garden project
Mother and Father ‘proper work’
Early years: sister and boarding school
Abandonment and loss but always ending on hope
All his books being autobiograhical
Oxford Pictures
Empty Days
Documentary - personal document
Seaside photographs

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

“You try and capture the world don’t you? You try and hold on to something. But it’s more than that - you want to capture an emotion, something that’s strong and lingering and grabbing hold of your interior life. I think that’s what I do, that’s what I WANT to do - create the emotion.”

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192 - Stephen Shore Nov 23, 2022

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

More than 25 books have been published of Stephen Shore's photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon's Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore: Survey and most recently, Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 and Stephen Shore: Elements. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his photographic career.

Stephen also wrote The Nature of Photographs, published by Phaidon Press, which addresses how a photograph functions visually. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London and Berlin. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

His new book, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography. A Memoir, was published by Mack Books in 2021.

On episode 192, Stephen discusses, among other things:

How the new book came about
How it differs from previous book, The Nature of Photographs.
Artist’s superstition over discussing the creative process
The importance of experimentation
Showing and not explaining
Photography as a ‘generous medium’
Creating the book as an ‘experience’
Structure vs. composition
Inclusion vs. exclusion
Mastering the discipline - 3 phases
Does he believe in The Muse?
Being attentive in the midst of life
Working with a performance coach
The influence of paintings… and Walker Evans
The nature (and importance) of ambition
Getting a solo show at The Met, aged 23
Sustaining drive
His interest in drone photography… and Instagram
The day he realised the 8x10 camera was for him

Referenced:

Website | Instagram | Interview with David Campany

“To look at something completely ordinary, what you see day to day in your life, and pay attention to it, that’s what interests me. And just from years of trying it and doing it, I feel like it provides a certain kind of food for people, that it’s nourishing.”

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100 - Ben Smith Mar 06, 2019

As a teenager I wanted to be a professional journalist and an amateur photographer. This was a perfectly good and eminently attainable goal for a bright, lower-middle class fifteen year old boy to have. So, for reasons that are too complicated to explore here, I promptly set about dismantling any prospect of achieving it in a miasma of Marlboro reds and vast quantities of Pakistani Black. After hundreds of identical misspent nights in the White Hart, a relentless pursuit of any and all self-destructive displacement activites, and a brief detour into the cul-de-sac of a media production degree, the ‘dream’ was eventually realised when I sat down in front of a portable typewriter (old sckool, y’all) and became a freelance journalist, contributing features on a diverse range of subjects to a wide array of publications from specialist magazines to national broadsheets.

This arrangement was soon to change, however, when a long-standing love of photography was re-ignited by a short succession of annual pilgrimages to the World Press Photo exhibition at the Barbican in London. Instinctively feeling - or perhaps hoping - that I may have caught a glimpse into my future, I enrolled on a post-graduate diploma in photojournalism at the London College of Printing, after which I managed to combine both disciplines before ultimately electing to focus on the photography. Thus the adolescent ambition was fulfilled, but arse about backwards.

Then a bunch of other stuff - aka ‘life’ - happened; I worked consistently as a freelance editorial photographer (though never really as much as I should have); had an all too brief foray into the big bucks of commercial and lifestyle commissions; made sure I torpedoed every opportunity to progress that came my way lest I might have to face the terrifying prospect of success; and more or less sleep-walked zombie-like through what should have been the best years of my life. Thankfully the Marlboro reds and Pakistani Black, and indeed the endless, Groundhog Day nights in the pub, had long since lost any allure they may have once had. As, to be brutally frank, had photography and just about everything else.

Anyway, then a bunch more stuff happened, most of which (with the notable exception of my inexplicably becoming a father) was less than fascinating. In 2015 I decided to start a photography podcast. I’ve written about the reasons for this in my blog but the truth is it was what the Americans might call a ‘hail Mary pass’. A last ditch attempt at dragging myself out of the mire of self-flagellation, regret, disappointment and depression in which I found myself. I’ve come to realise that though I seem to lack the confidence and self-belief to really succeed and thrive, I can at least always muster the necessary resources to save myself from oblivion. Such was the case in September 2015 when I started this podcast. As Marc Maron once put it when asked whether he could have imagined when he started his podcast eventually interviewing the President. “I didn’t imagine anything. It was an alternative to suicide!”

Thanks for listening. I really mean that. Here’s to the next 100 episodes. I’ll do them as well as I can, keeping in mind my aforementioned podcasting hero’s beautiful words of advice: try to act from your heart, no matter how broken it is.

In episode 100, I discuss, among other things:

Early days
First breaks
Regrets
Voice memos
The podcast
My long-term project: 'Indicative Only'.

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“Never believe you’ve played your last hand... Never believe you've played your last hand. There’s always more cards coming.”

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000 - Ben Smith (intro) Sep 10, 2015

Photographer, Ben Smith introduces a new weekly photography podcast: 'A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers' and answers a few 'frequently anticipated questions.'

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