The MOOD Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Why Your Photos Are Boring - Photographer David Chancellor Explains..., E128 Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

On this episode, I sat down with David Chancellor, the award-winning documentary photographer behind ‘Hunters’, ‘Handle Like Eggs’, and the Taylor Wessing Prize-winning portrait ‘Huntress with Buck’, for a conversation about the moral grey areas of documentary photography, trophy hunting, wildlife conservation. David has spent decades photographing human-wildlife coexistence across Africa, sleeping beside trophy hunters for weeks at a time, documenting leopard hunting in Namibia that was later stopped, and turning the personal cost of that work, including the collapse of his marriage, into his most intimate project.

We talked about how beauty gets people to look at what they'd rather turn away from, why access matters more than gear, how a photographer builds trust over years instead of parachuting in, and his current project rewilding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the National Center for Wildlife.

Watch this conversation and you'll understand how just one photograph can open a dialogue that could end an questionable pastime, and what it costs the person holding the camera.

Other things we discussed:

Getting fired from foreign exchange dealing and talking his way into photography school with "below average" work
The lion breeder who learned to see light and made the phone call behind the Taylor Wessing photo
If it pays, it stays: the brutal economics of wildlife conservation
The gamekeeper in Scotland whose hands kill deer and delivered his own son
Whether he has gone numb after decades of watching animals die
Photographing the birth, death, and compensation politics of community conservation in Kenya
David Attenborough, his front door key, and the cost of a legendary life
Film versus digital, the Mamiya 7, and why he shoots one consistent format
AI, authenticity, and what photography loses when everything becomes content

Find David and his work online:
https://www.davidchancellor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/chancellordavid/

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Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

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One Photograph Is All You Get Now, and Why That's Good News for Photographers - Moments of Mood, 3.8 Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

Attention has collapsed, and every photographer feels it. In this Moments of Mood episode, I make the case that this might be the best thing to happen to serious photography in a generation. You'll learn why the photographers who matter from here on won't be the ones who make the most, they'll be the ones who compress the best: one photograph dense enough to stop a stranger mid-scroll and earn the second look. I break down what has actually broken in visual culture (the capacity to stay, not the capacity to look), why posting more is a hiding place, and how a single ambassador image is the doorway that gets your photobook, sequence, and body of work found.
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Odette England Answers Every Photographer's Worst Fear, E126 Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

Odette Englandmakes her photographs and then damages them, and this conversation is about why that is the most honest thing she has ever done with her voice.

Odette is an Australian artist, writer and photography professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, whose latest book Isn't X Beautiful is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory and the limits of what a photograph can hold.

We talk about growing up on a 200 acre dairy farm in rural South Australia where her father made Polaroid portraits of newborn calves for their birth certificates and her mother typed captions into family albums, and how those 2 modes of picture keeping shaped everything she has made since. We go into her definition of beauty, which is broken, rusty and forlorn rather than pretty, the year she asked her elderly parents to walk their lost farm with her negatives strapped to the soles of their shoes, why she believes photography is drenched in want, and what writing gives her that photography cannot.

Odette talks openly about doubt, about being the least confident person in her own practice, about the drawers of failed work she now calls her box of potentials, and about the daily sentence habit that turned into something she never intended. We finish inside the critique room, on the questions she asks photographers who bring her work they cannot yet explain.

Other things we discussed:

Being refused entry to her school darkroom because she was a girl
Being the only woman in her class
Why the letter X sits at the centre of her book, and why the title ends in an exclamation mark
The 170 English words for the act of seeing
The folly of memory, wrong captions, and choosing to remember the fiction
Her image-based retelling of Susan Sontag's On Photography
Why she thinks moving forward is not always the right next step
What she sees in students of every age that worries her most

Find Odette on her website and Instagram:
https://www.odetteengland.com
https://www.instagram.com/odetteengland
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How To Find Your Voice Without Building a Signature Style - Moments of Mood, 3.7 Jul 23, 2026

Show notes

In this Moments of Mood episode I sit with a single photograph from my own archive, one I made by accident in under ten seconds, and use it to unpack an idea Cristina Mittermeiergave me: that the photographer is not a messenger but a membrane, a semi-permeable skin whose job is to let a conversation pass between the subject and the stranger who will one day stand in front of the print. I look at why the pressure to have a signature style is muting your photography, why your creative voice is not a possession you transmit but the shape of what you let through, and how ego, not lack of talent, is what fragments an emerging photographer's work.

There's a version of your portfolio where every frame is competent, consistent, technically strong, and somehow says nothing, and if you already know which images I mean, this episode is about why that happens and what your voice actually is instead.

I also get into the book launch that turned Cristina from marine biologist into one of the most seen photographers alive, why technically flawless photographs can be strangely silent, the unnamed photographer whose prints sell the man rather than the animal, the division of labor between vanishing inside the frame and showing up loudly outside it, why a style can be copied by a preset pack while permeability cannot, and a one-frame practice to try this week.

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Trent Davis Bailey: Every Photographer Hits The Wrong Notes Before Finding Their Voice, E124 Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

Trent Davis Bailey spent 7 years photographing a remote farming valley in Colorado, convinced he was making documentary work. He wasn't. The pictures knew before he did: he was searching for the family he'd lost to a twenty-year estrangement, and by the end of The North Fork he had found his aunt, his cousins, and the woman who became his wife. Then he turned the camera toward something far harder. His new photobook Son Pictures, published by Chose Commune, reckons with the crash of United Flight 232, the disaster that killed his mother when he was 3 years old, through his own photographs, family snapshots, newspaper archives, and the eerily premonitory artworks his mother made as a girl, including a drawing of a plane falling from the sky, made decades before she boarded one.

This is a conversation for any photographer who has ever suspected their work is about something they haven't admitted yet. We follow how a photography project becomes a mirror, how a photobook gets edited and sequenced when your heart is too close to the pictures, and how grief, memory and image-making feed each other over a decade of work.

Other things we discussed:

Being tied to a tree for his first ever photographs, and why he's glad the negatives were destroyed
The camera as a passport for a shy kid, and photography as a search for belonging
Why he hides many of his subjects' faces, and the 4-foot constraint that shaped The North Fork
Editing 60 pictures down to 46 with Trespasser, and handing his grief to the right publisher
Rebecca Solnit's essay, walking as a way of seeing, and why "capture" is the wrong word for photography
Watching a Hollywood reenactment of the crash at 7 years old, and how cinema colonises memory
Becoming a father, and the New York Times op-ed that revealed what Son Pictures was really about
Humor as an antidote to grief, and protecting play inside the heaviest work
Robert Adams, reusing photographs across books, and what follows a decade-long project

Find Trent’s work here:
https://trentdavisbailey.com
https://www.instagram.com/trentdavisbailey/
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The One Skill That Actually Makes Photography Beautiful (It's Not Composition) - Moments of Mood, 3.6 Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

In this episode you'll discover why beauty in photography is made by your attention, not found in your subjects, and how reading your own form reveals the photographic voice you've been searching for elsewhere.
In this Moments of Mood, I sit with one idea from my recent conversation with photographer and writer Tim Carpenter: that beauty in a photograph is form, not subject matter. Drawing on Robert Adams' book ‘Beauty in Photography’ and Tim's book ‘To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die’, I unpack what form actually is, why we have a bodily response to it, and how the way you meet the world is pressed invisibly into every frame you make. If you're an emerging photographer struggling to find your voice or make cohesive work, this one reframes where beauty, and your signature, actually live.
Other things we discussed:

Why photographs of beautiful subjects can still feel empty
Tim Carpenter's confession about being subject matter driven early in his career
Robert Adams on form as an answer to the fear that life is chaos
Why the most moving photographs hold together barely, not perfectly
How your body decides the photograph before you do
Mindfulness and attention as trainable photographic skills
A practical assignment for photographing the most ordinary place in your life

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The Inner Voice That Stops You Taking the Photo And Lies to Every Photographer, with Rory King - E122 Jul 02, 2026

Show notes

If you have ever felt technically capable but creatively lost, this conversation shows you how one photographer turned a decade of pictures, and the hardest years of his life, into a body of work that is unmistakably his own.

In this episode I sit down with Rory King, an Australian photographer who works in black and white, prints by hand in the darkroom, and turned 10 years of images into his photobook 'Gumsucker', published by Charcoal Press after he won the 2023 Charcoal Publishing Prize at the Chico Review. We talk about how photography found him, the darkroom as an emotional practice, his mental health struggles that nearly ended his life, and what it actually takes to find your own photographic voice.

Other things we discussed:

Why he refuses to scan film and prints everything by hand
Photographing the same friends for over 10 years
Handing close to 2,000 scans to his publisher and not seeing Gumsucker until years later
The bushrangers and Ned Kelly project he first presented at Chico
Whether the photography and publishing world is elitist and gatekept
How to share your work and find community
The role of family, friends, and sad music in his recovery
Momentum, and why taking the picture matters more than the picture itself

Rory's links:
www.roryking.net
www.instagram.com/kingroary
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What Koudelka's Photos Show Photographers About Finding Their Voice in the Age of AI - Moments of Mood, 3.5 Jun 25, 2026

Show notes

In this solo episode of Moments of Mood, you'll learn why the flood of AI images is about to make real, human photography more valuable, not less, and how to find the voice that's unmistakably yours.

I break down what AI really means for emerging photographers, starting with VSCO's "your eye can't be generated" campaign and the paradox that the same company also builds the AI tools and sells the reassurance back to you.

Drawing on Josef Koudelka's legendary photographs, the "revenge of the humanities," and his own work in a disappearing place, I argue that the crisis was/is never AI, it was handing the verdict on your work to everything outside yourself, and that scarcity, taste, and lived experience are about to become a photographer's most valuable assets.

Other touch points in this commentary:

Why your photography voice feels fragmented, and the real reason behind it
The 2am fear that your eye might be "ordinary"
Why a machine can render anything but can't be the witness
What an AI company founder says about the value of the humanities
The single reflection to find the one photograph that's truly yours

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Why Photographer Ridwan Didot Asks Every Artist "What's Wrong With You?", E120 Jun 18, 2026

Show notes

In this episode you'll learn how to tell whether your photography is actually art, why chasing technical perfection is holding your work back, and how to develop a photographic voice that's unmistakably your own.

This week Matt chats with Ridwan Didot, a fine art documentary and wedding photographer from Indonesia who runs the studio Native Visual and approaches commercial work with the eye and patience of a documentarian.

We get into one of the oldest debates in photography, whether there's such a thing as photography that is art and photography that isn't, and where that line actually sits. Ridwan shares why a photograph that still works in 50 years matters more than one that just looks good today, how 6 years photographing his own grandparents trained his eye more than any client job, and why he believes copying another photographer, or even copying your own past work, is genuinely impossible.

This is a conversation about intention, sensitivity, function over aesthetics, and the slow work of finding a creative voice that's truly yours.

Other things we discussed:

Why your mother's old family photos might teach you more than any workshop
The "demolition" theory of creativity: learning to construct a photo so you can destroy it
What Rick Rubin's The Creative Act gets right about making work without needing approval
How Diane Arbus reframed the relationship between the subject and the photograph
Why insecurity, used honestly, can be a tool rather than a weakness
Alfred Adler, the "neutral position", and how psychology shapes the photographer
The Photographer's Playbook and the danger of photographing feelings badly
Why the love and care you put into a frame is visible in the final image
The one question Ridwan asks every artist he meets

Ridwan's profile: https://www.instagram.com/ridwandidot/

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Your Body Decides the Photograph Before You Do - Photographer Tim Carpenter, E119 Jun 11, 2026

Show notes

Matt sits down with photographer, writer, and educator Tim Carpenter, author of 'To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die' and photobooks such as 'Local Objects', 'Little' and 'Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road', for a deep conversation on the philosophy beneath the photographic image.

In this episode you will learn a way to understand why the form of a photograph, not its subject, is where its meaning and beauty actually live, and how working with a camera can teach you to make peace with a world that will never bend to your wishes.

We explore the 'broken self' and the gap between the real and the ideal, why form is everything that is not in front of the camera, the difference between the depicted and the detected, how the body and the camera move through the world as a single instrument, why beauty in a photograph is a fleeting moment of equilibrium, and how a photographer can build a meaningful body of work and a real audience without chasing scale.

Other things we discussed:

Why great art resists interpretation, and the ethics of meeting a subject as something singular
The exposure test that reveals whether you truly care about form
How Tim moved from being subject-matter driven to understanding structure
Reading his own emotional distance in the photographs of Local Objects
The pinned butterfly problem in portrait photography
What Robert Adams wrote in a two-page handwritten letter
Why Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes may not help working photographers
The anti-solipsism machine, and how the camera refuses your projections
The loss behind Bucks Pond Road and the books that became a loose trilogy
Why you do not need a big audience to make work that matters

Tim's links:
Website: https://www.timcarpenterphotography.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timcarpenter

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