Stay ConnectedFortnightly in-depth interviews featuring a diverse range of talented, innovative, world-class photographers from established, award-winning and internationally exhibited stars to young and emerging talents discussing their lives, work and process with fellow photographer, Ben Smith. The most recent 50 episodes are on this free feed, 200+ more are in the archive!
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Lee Shulman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most significant archives of vernacular color photography in existence. Since 2017, the project has amassed nearly one million Kodachrome slides from the 1940s to the early 2000s — intimate, everyday images that might have otherwise been lost to time. Through curation and transformation, Lee reanimates these personal photographs, weaving them into compelling narratives that explore memory, family, love, and cultural shifts across generations.
Lee’s career also extends into film direction, notably with his debut feature documentary, "I Am Martin Parr," released in 2025. This film chronicles a road trip with renowned photographer Martin Parr, revisiting iconic locations from his oeuvre. Shulman's prior collaboration with Parr on the "Déjà View" project, which paired Parr's distinctive photographs with images from The Anonymous Project, laid the groundwork for their working relationship. The documentary provides an affectionate portrayal of Parr's artistic process and enduring work ethic, further cementing Lee’s engagement with the broader discourse of photography.
Born in London in 1973, Lee lives and works in Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and Rencontres d’Arles, and is held in major collections such as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Photo Elysée in Lausanne.
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Rachel Elizabeth Seed is a Brooklyn and Los Angeles-based nonfiction storyteller working in film, photography, and writing.
In 2025, she won the Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award for her debut feature film, A Photographic Memory, which is also a New York Times Critics Pick.
Rachel’s work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Films, the Jewish Film Institute, the California Film Institute, Jewish Story Partners, NYFA, Field of Vision, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, the Maine Media Workshops, the Roy W. Dean grant, the National Arts Club, IFP, and many others.
Formerly a photo editor at New York Magazine, her photography has been exhibited worldwide, including at the International Center of Photography, and she was a cameraperson on several award-winning feature documentaries. Rachel’s writing has been published by No Film School, the Sundance Institute, and Talkhouse and she is Executive Director / Co-founder of the Brooklyn Documentary Club, a NYC-based filmmaker collective with 250+ members.
In episode 271, Rachel discusses, among other things:
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Featuring:
Books/Projects mentioned:
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Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist, filmmaker, speaker and educator who has been making images and telling stories for 40 years. His restless creativity has continually placed him at the forefront of new approaches to visual storytelling. Dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times, a sensitive eye and an intimate and compassionate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his intense and unsparing work. As a member of VII Photo, Ed has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition.
Ed’s innovative approach to photography and filmmaking has produced a number of influential short films and earned recognition by the POYi Awards as 2015’s Multimedia Photographer of the Year. Ed’s embrace of technology has led to creative social media projects for clients including National Geographic, The New Yorker, and MSNBC. From implementing a unique approach to photography and filmmaking in his 2006 Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook, to paradigm shifting coverage of Hurricane Sandy for TIME in 2012, Ed continues to create compelling imagery and engage with the world in new ways.
Along with numerous awards from World Press Photo, POYi, CommArts and American Photography, Ed’s images have been published and exhibited worldwide. His editorial assignments and personal projects have generated fourteen books.
In 2002, Ed in partnership with his wife, writer + filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media. The non-profit company has produced numerous award-winning short films, exhibits, books, and multimedia pieces that explore significant social issues.
In 2019, The Enigma Room, an immersive installation, premiered at NYC’s Photoville festival, and has since been seen in Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, and New Mexico, USA.
HIs new book is, A Period In Time: Looking Back While Moving Forward, 1977 - 2022.
In episode 269, Ed discusses, among other things:
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Paul Sng is a bi-racial British Chinese filmmaker based in Edinburgh, Scotland whose work focuses on people who challenge the status quo. He has directed six feature documentaries, including Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche (winner of BIFA 2021 Best Documentary, BIFA 2021 Raindance Discovery Award), Tish (Sheffield DocFest 2023 Opening Gala film) and Reality Is Not Enough(Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 Closing Gala film). Paul strives to make bold and creatively ambitious films that connect emotionally with audiences, working collaboratively with great teams to tell stories about outsiders and amplify rebellious voices. In 2022 he was named as a BAFTA Breakthrough Artist and directed Folding, his first short drama film, funded by Screen Scotland and BFI Network.
In episode 268, Paul discusses, among other things:
Referenced:
Website | IMDB page | Instagram
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Fearturing:
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Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity was published by Twin Palms more than a decade ago in 2013, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it,” Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as “The Polaroid Kidd.” And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art world as suddenly and mysteriously as he’d first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he says. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.”
In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light.
If Michael Brodie’s first monograph was a cinematic dream, his latest, Failing, again published by Twin Palms in 2024, is the awakening and the reckoning, a raw, wounded, and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society’s edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie’s eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places — the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur.
Mike worked on and features in a recently released hour long documentary eponymously entitled Slack, the nickname of his one time girlfriend, Mia Justice Smith, who sadly died of a drug overdose, and to whom the film is dedicated. The film, which is directed by Mike’s friend and collaborator Cyrill Lachauer., revisits the freighthopping years and delves into Mike's creative collaboration with Mia.
In episode 266, Mike discusses, among other things:
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Merlin Daleman (b.1977) is a British photographer who has spent most of his adult life living in the Netherlands. He attended South Devon College, Torquay, the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) in the UK, and graduated from The Royal College of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works as a freelance documentary photographer for leading Dutch publications, including NRC Handelsblad, Dagblad Trouw, Financieel Dagblad, and De Groene Amsterdammer. He is the recipient of awards including the Silver Camera awards for Documentary Photography in the Netherlands in 2008 and 2010 and had received grants from the EU Journalism Foundation Grant and the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship. His debut photobook, Mutiny, published by GOST Books in August 2025, builds on his long-term projects, such as the new black lung epidemic in Kentucky, USA and exploring the lives of families separated by labour migration in Ukraine.
In episode 265 Merlin discusses, among other things:
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Eli Reed was born in the US in 1946 and studied pictorial illustration at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, graduating in 1969. In 1982, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he studied political science, urban affairs, and the prospects for peace in Central America.
Eli began photographing as a freelancer in 1970. His work from El Salvador, Guatemala and other Central American countries attracted the attention of Magnum, he was the first African American photographer, and indeed the first person of colour, to join the agency, becoming a full member in 1988.
In the same year, Eli photographed the effects of poverty on America’s children for a film documentary called Poorest in the Land of Plenty, narrated by Maya Angelou. He went on to work as a stills photographer for major motion pictures. His video documentary Getting Out was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1993 and honored by the 1996 Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame International Film and Video Competition in the documentary category.
Eli’s special reports include a long-term study which became his first, highly acclaimed book, Beirut, City of Regrets; the ousting of Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti (1986); US military action in Panama (1989); the Walled City in Hong Kong; and, perhaps most notably, his documentation of African American experience over more than 20 years. Spanning the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, his book Black in America includes images from the Crown Heights riots and the Million Man March. In 2015, he published his first career retrospective, A Long Walk Home.
Eli has lectured and taught at the International Center of Photography, Columbia University, New York University, University of Texas and Harvard University and is a member of Kamoinge, the collective of black photographers founded in 1963 and the longest continuously running non-profit group in the history of photography.
On episode 264, Eli discusses, among other things:
Referenced:
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