A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers (complete member-only archive)

165 - Nick Hannes

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 GMT

Nick Hannes was born in Antwerp in 1974. Based in Ranst, Belgium, he graduated from the Royal Acadehis of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent in 1997 and for the next eight years worked as a photojournalist before quitting press assignments in 2006 to fully concentrate on his own documentary projects, most of which have a strong political and social component.

His first trip was a year-long journey by bus and train through the former Soviet Union, which resulted in his first book. Red Journey (Lannoo Publishers, 2009). The book deals with the transitional phase in post-communist society and laid the foundation of Nick’s photographic approach in which irony, ambiguity and visual metaphors play prominent roles.

In 2010 Nick started Mediterranean. The Continuity of Man., an epic project that involved twenty trips to twenty one Mediterranean countries over a four year period. Published in 2014 by Hannibal Publishers (Belgium), this series juxtaposes parallel realities and paradoxes of the Mediterranean region, focusing on various contemporary issues such as mass-tourism, urbanization, migration, conflict and crisis. Mediterranean. The Continuity of Man.was launched at the Museum of Photography (FoMu) in Antwerp in 2014, before travelling to several international photography festivals and museums.

HIs third book, Garden Of Delight (Hannibal / Editions André Frère, 2018), showcases Dubai in the UAE as the ultimate playground of globalization and capitalism, and raises questions about authenticity and sustainability. This series was awarded the Magnum photography Award in 2017 and the Zeiss Photography Award in 2018.

During the outbreak of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020 Nick started to photograph his family in lockdown and the resulting visual diary, An Unexpected Lesson In Joy, was his first self-published book.

Nick has exhibited internationally and since 2008 has taught documentary photography at KASK/The School of Arts in Ghent. He is represented by Panos Pictures (London) and Black Eye Gallery (Sydney).

On episode 165, Nick discusses, among other things:

His lockdown project, An Unexpected Lesson In Joy.
His photographic origin story.
Early years in Kurdistan as an ‘activist with a camera’.
His first book project Red Journey, documenting his travels in the former Soviet Union.
How the project triggered his interest in urbanisation.
Mediterranean. The Continuity of Man.
The strangeness of Dubai, the most excessive example of market driven urban development.
How he got access to shoot the images in Garden Of Delight
How he manages to fund his trips.
How being able to travel again post lockdown made him feel ‘reborn’.
His next project focussing on new capital cities.

Referenced:

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea, Ernle Bradford
The Capsular Civilisation: On The City in the Age of Fear, 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

231 - Fotografia Europea 2024 Special

Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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

230 - Julia Kochetova

Wed, 08 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

229 - Michael Ackerman

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

228 - Valerie Belin

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

227 - Linda Troeller

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

226 - Nicole Tung

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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 trappe

225 - Mitch Epstein

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

224 - Edward Burtynsky

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.

223 - Lorenzo Castore

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

222 - Natalie Keyssar

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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 t

221 - Richard Kalvar

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

220 - Year in Review 2023

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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

219 - Leonard Pongo

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 GOSTearlier 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 Photographyat 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.”

218 - Paris Photo 2023 Special

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 GMT

Featuring:

217 - Max Pam

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 Magazineand 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<

216 - Corinne Dufka

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

215 - Luca Locatelli

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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?”

214 - The 1 Million Downloads Episode

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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?

213 - Ian Berry

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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:

Stuart Smith
Abbas
Roger Madden
Drum Magazine
Tom Hopkinson
The Sharpeville Massacre
Michele Chevalier (Visa)
Marc Riboud
Reni Burri
Henri Cartier Bresson
Burt Glinn
Peter Dench
David Allan Harvey
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. ”

211 - Yelena Yemchuk

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

210 - Moises Saman

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 Yearand 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 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…”

208 - Curran Hatleberg

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

207 - Bertrand Meunier

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

206 - Chico Review 2023 Special

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 09:00:00 GMT

Featuring:

Website | Instagram

205 - Photo London 2023 Special

Wed, 24 May 2023 09:00:00 GMT

Special report from the annual Photo London fair. 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

204 - Ivor Prickett

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 Caliphatewas 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 pho

203 - Stacy Kranitz

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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:

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.”

202 - Igor Posner

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

201 - Antoine D'agata

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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…”

200 - Emma Hardy

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 u

199 - Nick Brandt

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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
198 - Gregory Crewdson

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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 discusse

197 - Martin Parr (#2)

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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: 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 choseThe 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.
<

195 - Aaron Schuman

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 GMT

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.”

194 - The Year In Review 2022

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:00:00 GMT

The traditional year-end summary of all the brilliant photographers who had a chat with me on the podcast in 2022. Happy new year!

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

193 - Paddy Summerfield

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 GMT

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:

Gerry Badger
Ashmolean Museum
Dewi Lewis
Samuel Palmer
Sir Nick Serota

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.”

192 - Stephen Shore

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 GMT

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:

The Nature of Photographs
Lee Friedlander
Garry Winogrand
Bruno Bettelheim
Richard Avedon
Jerry Goldsmith
Gregory Crewdson
George Eliot
Walker Evans

Web

191 - Anastasia Samoylova

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984, USSR) is an American artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque.

Recent exhibitions include Eastman Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art; The Photographer's Gallery; Kunst Haus Wien; HistoryMiami Museum; and Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle.

In 2022 Anastasia was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections at the Perez Art Museum Miami and Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, among others.

Published monographs include Floridas (Steidl, 2022) and FloodZone (Steidl, 2019), with her latest work, Image Cities, forthcoming as a book and exhibition in 2023.

On episode 191, Anastasia discusses, among other things:

Recent hurricane
Forthcoming book and exhibition project, Image Cities
Her abiding interest in collage
Adding vs. reducing - abstracting the world
Florida and her FloodZone book
Her perspective on the climate emergency: alarmist but not defeatist
Why she ended up living in Miami
How she came to start making pictures
The distinctive Florida colour palette
The Floridas book
Climate anxiety - and other types
Having a strong work ethic

Referenced:

Stephen Shore
Eugène Atget
Jacques Tati
Mies van der Rohe
Ansel Adams
Walker Evans
David Campany
Alec Soth
William Eggleston
Alexander Rodchenko
Varvara Stepanova

Website | Instagram

“The key impulse here is the sense of gratitude for being able to do what I’ve always known I wanted to do, and feeling zero entitlement to this. It’s an immense privilege to be in this line of work.”

190 - BoP Bristol 2022 Special

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Featuring:

Tom Booth Woodger
Craig Easton
Aaron Schumann
Roger Deakins
Keith Cullen from Setanta Books
Martin Amis from photobookstore.co.uk and Photo Editions
Tom Broadbent from The Photobook Club Collective
Andi Galdi Vinko
Martin Parr
Matthew Killip
Chilli Power
Sam Binymin
Alys Tomlinson
Matt Martin from Photobook Cafe

Instagram  | Martin Parr Foundation |  Royal Photographic Society

189 - Ben Brody

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Ben Brody is an independent photographer, educator, and picture editor working on long-form projects related to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their aftermath. He is the Director of Photography for The GroundTruth Project and Report for America, and a co-founder of Mass Books.

His first book, Attention Servicemember, was shortlisted for the 2019 Aperture - Paris Photo First Book Award and is now in its second edition.

Ben holds an MFA from Hartford Art School's International Low-Residency Photography program. He resides in western Massachusetts.

On episode 189, Ben discusses, among other things:

How he got into photography.
How 9/11 influenced his decision to join the army.
The mandate he was given by his superiors.
Reappropriating the reappropriated.
How the media’s portrayal of war becomes a ‘feedback loop’.
Vernacular vs. ‘professional’ images of war, as exemplified by Abu Ghraib.
Why he went to Afghanistan as a civilian photographer.
Circumventing the restrictions of the embed program.
His new book 300M and how it came about.

Referenced:

Kurt Vonnergut, Slaughterhouse Five
Ed Clark
Joe Sacco
Shabana Basij-Rasikh

Website | Instagram | Books | 300m (video)

“I felt like there was a space in culture to make a photobook that was narrated by a totally ordinary soldier, who was not some scary CAG operator or CIA spook. And also by a pretty ordinary photographer, not like a famous photographer with a storied history who’s really invested in a cult of personal celebrity. When I made Attention Service Member and now 300M, which is almost like an epilogue to Service Member, I had the luxury of having probably seventy five photobooks already about the global war on terror that had come out before me. So I was able to analyse those books and assess, ‘what hasn’t been done before?’”

188 - Kavi Pujara

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Kavi Pujara (born Leicester, 1972) is a self-taught photographer. He has a BSc in Software Engineering and an MA in Screenwriting and he works as a film editor for the BBC alongside independently making personal, long-term documentary photo projects. His work has been included in the touring group exhibition Facing Britain, he was also one of the winners in the British Journal of Photography, Portrait of Britain 2020 and was the recipient of a Martin Parr Foundation photographic bursary in 2020. Two of his portraits have also this year been selected for the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition and will be on display in London from 27 October - 18 December 2022. His first book project, published by Setanta Books, is This Golden Mile. Photographed against the backdrop of Brexit, the Windrush scandal, and a government intent on reducing net migration, Kavi documents Indian migration to Leicester, where he was born, exploring themes of identity, home and Britishness. An exhibition of the work will open next weekend at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol.

On episode 188, Kavi discusses, among other things:

His family history
Growing up in Leicester
Experiences of racism growing up and on TV
Escaping Leicester to do a degree and discover music and books
Discovering cinema and film editing
His experience of screenwriting
Winning the MPF bursary
How moving back and the Brexit vote inspired This Golden Mile
Patriotism towards the UK amongst his parent’s generation of immigrants
The process of making the pictures for This Golden Mile
The Nationality and Borders Act
The value of having the mentorship of Martin Parr…
…and the two most important nuggets he imparted.

Referenced:

Joel Meyorwitz
Mike Muschamp
Tony Ray-Jones
Garry Winogrand
Dario Mitidieri
Asif Kapadia
Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson
Kalpesh Lathigra
Sathnam Sanghera
Sian Davey
Keith Cullen
Jason Taylor

Website | Instagram

“The spark [for the project] came from that moment of relocating back to Leicester and within two weeks of that was the EU referendum result. Both of those moments, the personal and the political were in the space of a few weeks and I wanted to use photography to reconnect with the community I grew up in…but it was impossible to ignore t

187 - Bryan Schutmaat

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Bryan Schutmaat is an American photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With his friend and fellow photographer Matthew Genitempo, he co-founded the imprint, Trespasser.

On episode 187, Bryan discusses, among other things:

How Grays The Mountain Sends was influenced by poet Richard Hugo and the landscape of Montana and the American west.
The connection between the state a person is from and the sterotype of what that means
Why the American west ‘breaks his heart’
How his dad shaped his view of the working class
Finding the commonalities between people and place
Good Goddamn and the freedom of switching to 35mm from large format
The close relationship between photography and poetry
Punk rock ethos as applied to Trespasser
His experience of the Hertford MFA program
The pros and cons of talking about your work as an artist
Vessels
NFTs

Referenced:

Richard Hugo
Wallace Stegna
Geoff Dyer
The 25th Hour
Townes van Zandt
Willie Nelson
Nelson Chan
Mike Mills
Spike Jonze
Minor Threat
Salad Days (documentary)
Matthew Genitempo
John Cassavettes
Five Easy Pieces
J Carrier
Tim Carpenter
Carl Wooley
Robert Lyons
Mary Fry
Alec Soth
Justine Kurland
Lois Connor
Robert Adams
Ingmar Bergman
Nomadland
The Thin Red Line
Saving Private Ryan
The Grapes of Wrath
Pablo Cabado
Leon Bridges
Abigail Varney

Website | Instagram

“I think in this new space of iPhones and NFTs - I’m looking down at my iPhone right now - that’s just an undignied way to look at photographs you’ve put a lot of time and effort into. So the pictures on my website of installation shots or of books are just to remind people that what you’re looking at on screen is a very compromised version of what these pictures oughta be… it’s basically telling the viewer that, if you can, I would like this website to be a stepping stone to experience the book or the exhibition. It’s just sort of attempting to remind people that prints and physical tactile things matter in this digital age. So I don’t want to see that lost.”

186 - Sam Jones

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Sam Jones is an acclaimed American photographer and director whose portraits of President Obama, Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Bob Dylan, Kristin Stewart, Robert Downey Jr, Amy Adams, Jack Nicholson, and many others have appeared on the covers of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Time, Entertainment Weekly and Men’s Journal. His collection of candid celebrity portraiture, The Here And Now: The Photographs of Sam Jones, was published by Harper Collins. Other published works include Non-Fiction, a collection of cinematic portraiture, and Some Where Else, a photographic book and musical collaboration with musician Blake Mills.

Sam is also an acclaimed director, creating numerous national commercials for Skype, Sonos, Canon, Target, Dove and many others. He is a sought after music video director who won MTV’s music video of the year for Foo Fighters Walk. He has directed videos for Mumford and Sons, Tom Petty, John Mayer, and many others. He also directed the multi-award winning interactive video for Cold War Kids’ I’ve Seen Enough.

In 2013 Sam launched Off Camera with Sam Jones on Directv’s Audience Network. Off Camera is an hour long show created out of his passion for long form conversational interviews. Via worldwide broadcast, online magazine, and podcast, Jones shares his conversations with the artists, actors, and musicians who fascinate and inspire him most. Robert Downey Jr., Sarah Silverman, Dave Grohl, Laura Dern, Tony Hawk, Matt Damon and Will Ferrell have all appeared on the show.

Sam directed the feature length Showtime Documentary Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, a film that reexamines Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and documents new recordings of lost Dylan lyrics by Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford and others in Capitol Records Studios. The film features Bob Dylan as narrator, and documents the exciting collaboration between some of the most successful current artists in music and a 26-year-old Bob Dylan. The film premiered on Showtime Networks.

In 2002, Sam started his feature-length documentary career with I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, which chronicles beloved indie-rock band Wilco’s tumultuous recording of their acclaimed fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and his most recent feature length documentary, Until The Wheels Fall Off, a portrait of the life and career of legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk, was released earlier this year.

Sam lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three daughters.

On episode 186, Sam discusses, among other things:

The unholy trinity of skateboarding, bands and zines.
Finishing what you started.
The amazing saga of his documentary about the band Wilco, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.
How the town he grew up in, Fullerton, California, influenced his path in unexpected ways.
Photography seeming like the safe choice.
Confidence.
The shift that occurred as he gained experience.
His TV show / podcast, Off Camera and what he learned from doing it.
The societal change in the way we see famous people.
His documentary about skateboarder Tony Hawk, Black Diamonds was released by Fall Line Press. The work is a visual exploration of the former coal mining boom towns of SE Ohio, Appalachia. Subsequently, it was highlighted by Charcoal Book Club as their “Book-Of-The-Month.” Black Diamonds is also part of the permanent collection at the Frederick and Kazuko Harris Fine Arts Library and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s Research Library.

Having successfully run a kickstarter campaign which met the target funding, Rich is currently in the process of producing his next monograph Little Cities, slated to be released in Autumn 2022 by Little Oak Press. The work examines how both Indigenous peoples and descendants of settler colonialists inhabited and utilized the land around them.

On episode 185, Rich discusses, among other things:

Where he lives in Millfield, ohio
Becoming a dad at 17
His journey into photography
Living in the UAE
How he ended up living in rural Ohio
The origins of the project Black Diamonds
Being a person of colour in the U.S. during the Trump years
Appalachia and its attendent photographic clichés
His latest book Little Cities
Why doing a book without people in it is ‘scary’.
The Bubble - a possible 3rd part of a trilogy

“I was feeling great about the community. I was super excited about it, every day going out and making images. Everything was resonating with me. It was like being in a Disney movie and all the birds were chirping…”

184 - Joanne Coates

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Joanne Coates is an English, working class documentary photographer based in North Yorkshire, interested in rurality, hidden histories and class. She was born in the rural North of England, educated first in working class alternative communities, then at The Sir John Cass School of Fine Art and The London College of Communication from where she has a Ba Hons in Photography. Her practice is as much about process, participation and working with communities as the still image. Joanne’s work has been exhibited both in the UK and internationally.

Joanne is Director of the Arts organisation Lens Think, a Social Enterprise based in Yorkshire and the North East, dedicated to making opportunities and gaining access for marginalised groups & developing photography in the North of England. Its aim is to fight for class equality and a more creative industries through participation and radical community arts. The organisation works with schools, and provides mentorships to 3 artists per year.

In 2021 Joanne was a joint awardee of the Jerwood / Photoworks prize. The resulting work, The Lie of the Land, explores the social history of the land and narrates a story of gender and class in relation to the countryside of the North East of England, and will be exhibited at The Jerwood Space in London from 23 September – 10 December 2022.

Her project Daughters of the Soil, about role of women in agriculture in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders, was published as a book, in a small, limited-edition print run, and is now more or less sold out. The work will be exhibited at the Vane Gallery, Gateshead from 11 August – 3 September 2022, where there will be a few remaining copies of the book available.

On episode 184, Joanne discusses, among other things:

How her practice has shifted
The Lie of The Land and Daughters of the Soil
Class and why it’s important to her identity and work
Social mobility
Northern culture and the North / South divide
Tall poppy syndrome and being yourself
The importance of community
Engaging with her subjects
Why everyone is a political photographer
Lens Think
Advantages vs. disadvantages of being based up north
Her recent autism diagnosis

Referenced:

Nathalie Olah
Jo Spence
Nan Goldin
Gregory Crewsdon
The Girls Network
Molly Dineen
Becky Beasley
Disability Visibility

Website | Instagram | Twitter

“I’m never gonna be that person who walks up to someone at a private view and says ‘

183 - Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022 Special

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Featuring:

Susan Meiselas
Kristine Potter
Vanessa Winship
Curran Hatleberg
Klavdij Sluban

182 - Greg Williams

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Greg Williams is one of the most trusted and acclaimed photographers in entertainment—his name and candid portraiture synonymous with authentic glamour.

Greg established his reportage style as a photojournalist in the ‘90s—covering war zones in Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone. An assignment for the Sunday Times Magazine gave Greg his first access to the film industry and he has now shot ‘specials’ on over 200 movies, including four poster campaigns for the Bond franchise. Greg has also enjoyed exclusive access to BAFTA, the Golden Globes and the Oscars and is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue.

In addition to his prodigious photographic output, Greg is also a filmmaker, principally with his first person, ‘moving reportage’ documentaries, and a product designer—Greg’s limited edition Leica Q2, in partnership with Daniel Craig, is Leica’s fastest selling large scale edition. His education platform Skills Faster, is home to his highly successful Candid Photography Course, with the intention of ‘democratising good photography’.

After 30 years in the business Greg’s talent and brand relationships are second to none. He publishes exclusives to over 1M followers on Instagram and on gregwilliams.com where he also sells his products and prints. Greg Williams Photography operates from Greg’s studio/gallery space in Mayfair, London.

On episode 182, Greg discusses, among other things:

The “transformative” impact of having a huge Instagram folllowing.
Keeping it simple.
Colloboration with his subjects.
His free newspaper, Hollywood Authentic.
Wanting to be a photographer at 6.
His dyslexa and why it’s good to not have too many options in life.
Early experiences pursuing photojournalism in Chechnya and Sierra Leone.
Covering show jumping bunny rabbits and other syndicated stories.
His entree into shooting behind the scenes on film sets.
Why he always shows his subjects the picture of themselves.
James Bond.
Sharing his knowledge and process on his website and in his courses.
Why he favours B&W.
Plans for the future, including some podcasting.

Website | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

“I’d done a lot of commercial work; a lot of advertising work; a lot of lit stuff; a lot of set building; a lot of stuff that required a huge amount of production; and for me there was something about bringing that all back in to one man with the cameras that fit into his shoulder bag, walking into a room without anybody else needed other than a subject.”

181 - Lewis Bush

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Originally from London, Lewis Bush studied at the University of Warwick, worked as a researcher for the United Nations HIV/AIDS taskforce in Geneva, and in 2012 started to develop his own research led photographic projects. In his work he looks for ways to visualise powerful agents, practices and technologies, and the links that connect them. To do this he employs a wide range of research strategies, from depth interviewing to open source investigation, and works across media and platforms, using photography, text, video, data visualisation, exhibitions, books, films, and apps.

For Metropole (2015) he investigated the transformation of London at the hands of unaccoutable developers and property speculators. In Shadows of the State (2018), he examined the secret communications used by intelligence agencies, creating images from intercepted signals and uncovering a previously unknown geography of covert radio broadcast sites. Many of his projects have been published as books and have been featured in the press internationally.

In 2018 Lewis spent six months as photographer in residence at the Société Jersiaise in the Bailiwick of Jersey, where he laid the groundwork for an ongoing project about the international finance industry, tentatively titled Trading Zones. In 2019 he was BMW artist in residence at Gobelins – École de l’image, Paris, France, working on an augmented reality app about computer vision and artificial intelligence, titled Ways of Seeing Algorithmically.

As well as being recipient of both the Archisle and BMW residencies, his work has been nominated and shortlisted for numerous international prizes.

As an educator Lewis teaches on the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (online/part-time) course at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and has been a visiting speaker at numerous other institutions and he is currently a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics, department of Media and Communications where he is researching the impact of machine intelligence on photojournalism, and consequently on democracy, funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant.

Lewis recently fully funded on Kickstarter a forthcoming book entitled Depravity's Rainbow: A Dark History of Space Travel which explores the influence of imperialism, the Holocaust, and the Cold War on contemporary space exploration.

On episode 181, Lewis discusses, among other things:

Depravity's Rainbow and the fascinating story of Wernher von Braun
Number Stations, as featured in his project Shadows of the State
Making abstract subjects visible
The perils of calling people out for ethical transgressions
Current trends among photography students
His photographic and academic journey
Blueprints and cyanotypes
The colonisation of space by billionaires
His project, Metropole
His blog, Disphotic
180 - Pradip Malde

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Pradip Malde is a photographer and a professor at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is the co-director of the Haiti Institute. Much of his work considers the experience of loss and how it serves as a catalyst for regeneration. He is currently working in rural communities in Haiti, Tanzania and Tennessee, designing models for community development through photography.

Pradip’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of the Art Institute, Chicago; Princeton University Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Yale University Museum and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, among others. He is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Pradip was born in Arusha, Tanzania in 1957. His parents were the children of Indians who emigrated to East Africa but had to flee from the turmoil that spread through that region in the 1970s. Concerned about loss and belonging since then, he has come to think of artifacts as membranes, where what may be explicit and immutable begins to lead us into the realms of memory and meaning, and, ultimately, an understanding of the experiences of others.

Pradip’s first monograph, entitiled From Where Loss Comes, was recently published by Charcoal Press. It is an unblinking look at how sacrifice and belonging are deeply rooted in the human experience, examining the story of the root causes of female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C).

On episode 180, Pradip discusses, among other things:

Resilience
How boarding school in England changed his life
Scotland
Sawanee and teaching
How loss serves as a catalyst for regeneration
From Where Loss Comesand why it’s important for him that the book is not just about FGM/C
Haiti
His love of platinum and other arcane printing processes
Going digital

Website | Instagram

“The work that we do as photographers is about transforming attitudes; about giving access to a poetic experience; it is about somehow reaching beyond our day to day lives; it is about aspiring to be better. And that’s all big stuff.”

179 - Photo London 2022 Special

Wed, 25 May 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Special report from the annual Photo London 2022 shindig at Somerset House.

Featuring:

James Hyman
Emma Blau
Brett Rogers, The Photographer’s Gallery
Deanna Lawson
Max Miechowski
David Campany (on the work of Anastasia Samoylova)
Alys Tomlinson
Aletheia Casey
Jillian Edelstein
Matt Stuart

178 - Chico Review 2022 Special (pt.2)

Wed, 11 May 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Part 2 of my special report from this year’s annual Chico Hot Springs portfolio review in Montana, USA.

Featuring attendees:

Torry Brown - Website / Instagram
Todd Rigos - Website / Instagram
Dena Eber - Website / Instagram
Hunter Lacey - Website / Instagram
Erinn Springer - Website / Instagram
Caroline Suzman - Website / Instagram
Lori Ordover - Website / Instagram
Kyle Makrauer - Website / Instagram
Chanell Stone - Website / Instagram
Jessica Hays - Website / Instagram
Issiah Winters - Website / Instagram
Hannah Kiviranta - Website / Instagram
Debe Arlook - Website / Instagram
Malika Ali Harding - Website / Instagram

177 - Chico Review 2022 Special (pt.1)

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Featuring attendees:

Elijah Howe - Website / Instagram
Tracy L. Chandler - Website / Instagram
Ana Hop - Website / Instagram
Andrea Koesters - Website / Instagram
Shannon Cavarocchi - Website / Instagram
Myriam Abdelaziz - Website / Instagram
Mayita Mendez - Website / Instagram
Jono Terry - Website / Instagram
Leslie Hakim-Dowek - Website / Instagram
Trey Horvath - Website / Instagram
Eric Sung - Website / Instagram
Liliana guzmán - Website / Instagram
Cody Bratt - Website / Instagram
Nick Haight - Website / Instagram
Andrés de Varona - Website / Instagram
Courtney Allen - Website / Instagram
Sabrina Giacomaggio - Website / Instagram

176 - Alba Zari

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Alba Zari is a visual artist working with photography, video and sound. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1987 where she lived until the age of eight. She later moved to Italy, ﬁrst to Trieste and then to Bologna, where she graduated from university with a degree in ﬁlm. She went on to study documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York city, and then continued her studies in photography and visual design at the NABA in Milan.

Alba’s photographic practice explores social themes and includes a study of Italian mental health centres; eating disorders in the USA; Places (2015), a book and a photographic project which analyses the visual communication of ISIS propaganda; and Radici (2013), a documentary project on the vegetation of the Mesr desert in Iran. Her first book The Y - Research of Biological Father was released by Witty Books in 2019 and was born out of a journey in search of her origins through the father she never knew.

Alba is currently working on an ongoing project called Occult, a visual study of the propaganda of the cult Children of God, into which both her grandmother and mother were indoctrinated and Alba herself was born. The project will be exhibited later in 2022 and is being developed into a feature length documentary film entitled White Lies. She released her first short documentary FreiKörperKultur recently.

On episode 176, Alba discusses, among other things:

Use of research
Children of God cult
The documentary feature film she’s working on
Belief in photography and truth
The Y - finding out the truth about her biological father
Why she ‘created him’
Finding the man that signed her birth certificate
Getting the strength to do the project, Occult
Earning a living
NFTs

Website | Instagram

“Some things are private and you keep them to yourself and some others are the work itself and to be able to seperate these things is important.”

175 - Patrick Brown

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Patrick Brown has devoted himself to documenting critical issues around the world often ignored by the mainstream media. His groundbreaking project on the illegal trade in endangered animals won a World Press Photo Award in 2004 and a multimedia award from POYi in 2008. Patrick’s book Trading to Extinction was nominated in the ten best photo documentary books of 2014 by AmericanPhoto. In 2019 he published No Place On Earth which provides an intimate portrait of the survivors of the persecution of the Myanmar’s Rohingya population in 2017.

Patrick has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the 2019 FotoEvidence Book Award and two World Press Photo Awards. His work has been exhibited internationally at Centre of Photography in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, Visa pour l’Image in France and his work is also held in private collections.

Patrick is a regular contributor to a wealth of publications, including, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, TIME, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, National Geographic and Mother Jones, and has worked with such organisations as UNICEF, UNHCR, Fortify Rights and Human Rights Watch.

On episode 175, Patrick discusses, among other things:

His peripatetic upbringing
How the surgeon that saved his young life also changed its trajectory
Finding it difficult to photograph people he knows
Moving to Thailand
The Thai/Burmese border
Trading to Extinction
Why the book was such a ‘painful’ experience he nearly quit
No Place On Earth
Why you have to go to editors and not wait for them to come to you
The ethical questions of documenting horrific situations
Suffering from ‘moral injury’
Why he included images of tools in No Place On Earth
His involvement in the Alex Gibney film The Forever Prisoner

Referenced:

Josef Koudelka
James Nachtwey
Sebastião Salgado
Adam Ferguson
Emphas.is
Stuart Smith
Dewi Lewis
Alex Gibney
Sir Roger Deakins

Website | Instagram

“I’m always asking myself on these kind of stories, these kind of issues, ‘am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right position morally?’ If you stop asking those questions I think you w

174 - Jem Southam

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Born in Bristol in 1950, Jem Southam is one of the UK's most renowned landscape photographers, working predominately in the South West of England where he lives.

Jem’s richly detailed works document subtle changes and transitions within the landscape, allowing him to explore cycles of life and death, decay and renewal, through spring and winter, and also to reveal the subtlest of human interventions in the natural landscape. His work is characterised by its balance of poetry and lyricism within a documentary practice and combines topographical observation with other references: personal, cultural, political, scientific, literary and psychological. Jem's working method combines the predetermined and the intuitive. Seen together, his series suggest the forging of pathways towards visual and intellectual resolution.

Jem has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers Gallery, London, Tate St Ives, Cornwall and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London and his work is held in many important collections, both in the UK and internationally.

Until his retirement from teaching three years ago, Jem was Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth and he is represented by the Huxley Parlour Gallery in London.

On episode 174, Jem discusses, among other things:

His student experience.
Changes to the photographic culture.
The importance of negative film.
The gallery he ran in Bristol with friend Adrian Lovelace.
Myths and stories.
Bodies of water and Winter.
What is a river?
The influence of land art.
The Pond at Upton Pyne.
His switch to digital and how a broken elbow contributed to it.

Referenced:

Martin Parr
Paul Strand
Bill Brandt
Paul Graham
Tony Ray Jones
The Bechers
Robert Adams
Susan Butler
Adrian Lovelace
Bruegel
Richard Hamlyn
Barbara Bosworth
Josef Sudek
Sigma DP2

Instagram

“I made a still life picture of an apple when I was a student, with a plate camera. I still remember now that I stood back took the cloth off the top of my head and I said ‘this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life’... This apple stood in for the colour of the English landscape. It was a sort of metaphorical kind of emblem.”

— Jem Southam

173 - Eva Voutsaki

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Eva Voutsaki is a Greek photographer and educator based in Brighton, England. She spent her early childhood in Drakona, a small village in Crete, before moving to Chania aged 15 to attend a better school.

Eva holds a degree in Law, an MA in Photography, a foundation in Art Therapy and a PGCE in Further Education.

Mythology, memory, fantasy and the unconscious form the basis for her creativity. Her project Traces Within, self published as a handstitched book in 2020, has been awarded honourable mentions at the 2008 and 2009 PX3 Paris Photography Prize competition and has been internationally recognized and exhibited at the 2009 Arles juried festival Voies Off, 2010 Rome Fotografia Festival at the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Arts, BOM gallery in Seoul, Menier and HOST gallery in London, among other places.

Since 2008, Eva has been working collaboratively and intergenerationally on the family archives of her village Drakona in Crete. Her book dummy Family Photo Sketch Book: The Drakona Block was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Kassel International Photobook Dummy Award and in 2015 Eva was selected for the Magnum Professional Practice Masterclass in London.

On episode 173, Eva discusses, among other things:

Burnout
Academia
The importance of walking
Subjective photography
Her childhoom in Crete
How she ended up studying law and becoming a Solicitor
The importance of therapy
Her book, Traces Within
Her interest in maths
Imposter syndrome
Poetry
Adventures in self-publishing
The pretentiousness of the photo industry
Her father and grandfather and transgenerational trauma
Her brother, who survived a climbing accident
Forthcoming projects A Human’s Tale and Drakonians

Referenced:

Emily Macaulay at Stanley James Press
Vanessa Winship
Ramon Reverteat Editorial RM
Daisuke Yokota - Back Yard
Olof Palme

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

172 - Peter Fraser

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:30:00 GMT

Born 1953 in Cardiff, Wales, Peter Fraser acquired his first camera at the age of 7 and after a false start studying Civil Engineering, at 18, began studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic the following year. In the summer of 1974 he lived in New York and worked at the Laurel Photography Bookstore at 32nd St and 6th Avenue which significantly expanded his sense of photography’s expressive possibilities. He graduated in 1976 after repeating his 3rd year due to major illness crossing the Sahara, while photographing in West Africa.

Peter lived in Holland and Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, before moving back to Manchester in 1981. He then began working with a Plaubel Makina camera in 1982 which led to an exhibition with William Eggleston at the Anolfini, Bristol in 1984, and a move to that city. In summer 1984 Peter travelled to Memphis, USA to spend nearly two months with Eggleston, which confirmed for him the desire to commit his life to working with colour photography.

He then worked on several series of photographs, leading to a first publication, Two Blue Bucketswhich won the Bill Brandt Prize in London (the precursor of the CitiBank International Photography Prize), in 1988. He moved to London in 1990, subsequently publishing several new bodies of work, including Ice and Water 1993, Deep Blue 1997, Material 2002, and Peter Fraser (Nazraeli Press) 2006.

In 2002, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, staged a 20 year survey exhibition of Peter’s work, and he was shortlisted for the Citigroup International Photography Prize in 2004. In 2006 he was invited to be an Artist in Residence at Oxford University, England and produced new work for permanent installation in their new Biochemistry building in 2008.

In 2009 Peter was given a major commission by The Ffotogallery, Wales, to return to his country of birth, to make new work for a solo exhibition at the gallery, which opened in March 2010, with a new publication, Lost For Words.

In 2008 Fraser began working on A City In The Mind a new series of photographs in London, which was shown at Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery, London in May 2012 accompanied by a Steidl Publication.

From January to May 2013, Tate St Ives held a retrospective of Fraser’s career, the first Tate Retrospective for a living British Photographer working in colour, and Tate published a major monograph on the whole of Fraser’s career with a text by David Chandler. Tate purchased 10 works for their permanent collection from the Two Blue Buckets series in 2014. In 2014 Peter was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society, UK.

In spring 2017 Peperoni Books, Berlin, published a new ‘Director’s Cut’ of Fraser’s 1988 publication Two Blue Buckets with 19 missing images from the original, and a new essay by Gerry Badger and a discussion between Fraser and David Campany.

In 2017 Peter’s exhibition Mathematics was exhibited at the Real Jardin de Botanico, Madrid, part of PhotoEspana 17 and Skinnerboox, Italy, published Mathematics with 52 colour plates, and essays b

171 - Mimi Plumb

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Born in Berkeley, California and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, Mimi Plumb has served on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.

Since the 1970s, Mimi has explored subjects ranging from her suburban roots to the United Farmworkers movement in the fields as they organized for union elections. Her first book, Landfall, published by TBW Books in 2018, is a collection of her images from the 1980s, a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, was published by Stanley/Barker in September, 2020. The Golden City, her third book, due to be published by Stanley/Barker in early 2022, focuses on her many years living in San Francisco.

Mimi received her MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976. Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. She is a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, and has received grants and fellowships from the California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography, and the Marin Arts Council.

On episode 171, Mimi discusses, among other things:

Memories of her suburban childhood in California.
Her book, The White Sky.
Why her it took decades for her work to be published.
Memories of the dustbowl drought and the theme of climate change.
Chernobyl and her childhood insomnia triggered by a fear of nuclear war.
Her first book, Landfall, about the 80s.
Her tendancy to shoot people’s backs.
Her 70s project on the United Farmworkers Union, Pictures from the Valley.
The enthusiastic critical reception that both Landfall and The White Sky were met with.
Her soon to be pulished book The Golden City.
Working with publisher Stanley Barker.
Having no idea what to do with her colour work on women and girls.

Referenced:

Diane Arbus
Farm Security Administration
John Collier Jnr.
The Crass song (not The Cure!) Nagasaki Nightmare
Paul Sch

170 - Robert Gumpert

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Robert Gumpert is a California-based photographer with extensive international experience, documenting social issues and institutions, including service and industrial work, jails and the criminal justice system, and emergency rooms and paramedics. His collaborative Take A Picture/Tell a Story project in the San Francisco County jails. exchanges inmates’ portraits for their stories. He has also created abstract art from the textures and colors of the bridges, walls, highway supports and fallen leaves of London and San Francisco. Robert’s forthcoming book, Division Street, will be released by Dewi Lewis Publishing early in 2022.

On episode 170, Robert discusses, among other things:

Kyle Rittenhouse verdict
The geography of San Franciso
The history of the tech financial boom in S.F.
How he came to pursue the Division Street project
Quitting his long-term gig and having to relearn how to shoot
How his prison project, Take A Picture/Tell a Story came about
His interest in recording audio
Some of the stories he was told
Internet criticism

Referenced:

Day In The Life books
Dewi Lewis
Neil Burgess

Website | Twitter | Division Street book

“It’s not that hard to get people’s trust. If you do what you say you’re gonna do, and you treat people like human beings, people are gonna trust you.”

169 - Alison McCauley

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 GMT

Alison McCauley has a BA Hons in visual arts from the Winchester School of Art, a BA Hons in creative arts – photography, from the Open College of the Arts, UK and a postgraduate diploma in visual arts – painting, Haute école d'Art et de Design, Geneva. Her approach to the people and locations she photographs is instinctive, open-ended and subjective. She weaves her images together to create non-linear, intuitive narratives. Alison’s work often explores the idea of identity, belonging and memory and images are frequently infused with melancholy and feelings of restlessness and loss. Alison is especially interested in presenting her visual narratives in books that she makes by hand.

Copies of Alison's books are in the Tate Library and Archive, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Cannes Library. She is a member of UP Photographers and a selection of her work is represented by Millennium Images. Alison's work has been featured widely in print and online.

Alison is currently based in Geneva and her new book, Anywhere But Here was recently published by Photo Editions.

On episode 169, Alison discusses, among other things:

How she found a publisher for Anywhere But Here
Working on zines and limited edition books
The feeling of restlessness and not belonging
Living in Geneva
Growing up in Malaysia
Some of her unorthodox methods
Her background in painting
The physical pleasure of making books
Her work at the Cannes film festival
Her current project in the south of France, Shimmer

Website | Instagram | Facebook | New Book

“I kind of don’t want to get that beautiful feeling of being peaceful in a place and feeling great, because then I’d have no more impetus to keep searching and that’s what’s powering the work at the moment.”

168 - The Year In Review 2021

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:00:00 GMT

FEATURING:

Evgenia Arbugaeva
Nanna Heitmann
Jason Eskanazi
David Yarrow
Alejandro Gartagena
Tania Franco Klein
Christian Patterson
Ron Jude
Craig Easton
Matthew Genitempo
Bryan Schutmaat
Lottie Davies
Igor Posner
Ben Brody
KIrsty Mackay
Hannah Reyes Morales
Tom Wood
Alys Tomlinson (Photo London Special)
Naomi Harris
Jonas Bendiksen
Paul Reas
Nick Hannes
Anna Fox
Adam Ferguson

167 - Adam Ferguson

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:00:00 GMT

167 - Adam Ferguson

Adam Ferguson is an Australian freelance photographer. He was born and grew up in regional New South Wales, Australia, before studying photography at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. After graduating he travelled from port to port through the Caribbean and Mediterranean as crew on a sailboat to fund the start of his photographic career until, in 2008, he flew to New Delhi on a one-way ticket and spent the next eight years based in Asia.

Adam first gained recognition for his work in 2009 when he embarked on a sustained survey of the US-led war in Afghanistan. Since that time he has worked internationally, contributing to The New York Times Magazine, TIME Magazine and National Geographic, among others. Much of his work focuses on conflict and on civilians caught amidst geopolitical forces. In recent years, it has also concentrated on climate change.

Adam’s portraits of various heads of state have appeared on numerous Time Magazine covers and over the years he has been the recipient of awards from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International (POYI), Photo District News, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, and American Photography. His photographs have also been included in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

Adam lives in Brooklyn, New York and is currently working on two monographs: a war diary of his time in Afghanistan and a survey of his home country’s sparsely populated interior and its colonial legacy.

On episode 167, Adam discusses, among other things:

His experience of hotel quarantine in Sydney, Australia.
His substack newsletter / blog.
His return to Australia to work on a story there.
Reflections on climate change.
Reflections on Afghanistan in the aftermath of the recent withdrawal.
His idealism and naeivty going in.
A shift towards portraiture.
How he embraced a beginner’s mindset to brush up on his lighting and studio skills.
The Afghans portrait series.
The Bombs They Carried series.
Being the equivalent of a film director.
PTSD, Ayuaushca and a veterens on retreat story.

Referenced:

Philip Jones Griffiths
Tim Page
Michael Borremans

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Substack Blog

“Every time I light something, I learn something about lighting...”

166 - Anna Fox

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:00:00 GMT

Born in 1961 and completing her degree in Audio Visual studies at The Surrey Institute, Farnham in 1986, Anna Fox began her career as a documentary photographer. Influenced by the British documentary tradition and the USA’s ‘New Colourists’, she chronicled new town life in Basingstoke (locally known as ‘Doughnut City’) and went on to publish the monograph Work Stations (1988), a study of London Office life in Thatcher’s Britain. These works were exhibited extensively as far a field as Brazil and Estonia and in Through the Looking Glass, at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1989 curated by David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, establishing Anna as a significant figure within the field of new colour documentary.

In later projects, made in the 1990’s, In Pursuit (1990), The Village (1991-1992 Cross Channel Photographic Mission commission), Friendly Fire (1992) and Zwarte Piet (the Netherlands 1994-1999) Anna created a new direction inventing innovative approaches and raising questions regarding the problems of documentary practice. These projects were exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions including The Photographers Gallery, London and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

By early 2000 Anna produced two autobiographical works: Cockroach Diary and My Mothers Cupboards and my Father’s Words which completely turned on its head the notion of the documentary photographer as outsider. These new works investigated the personal and difficult world of domestic households and relationships bringing together a mix of image and text in two miniature book works. Later in 2003 the series Made in Europe questioned further the power relation between subject and photographer by handing over power to the subject in whork that portrayed a vision of contemporary Europe through the eyes and voices of teenagers.

The projects Country Girls (1996-2001) and Pictures of Linda (1983-ongoing) introduced a collaborative element to Anna’s practice: by working in partnership with the singer/songwriters Alison Goldfrapp and Linda Lunus the relationship between subject and photographer was being explored from a new perspective.

Anna was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize and the 2012 Pilar Citoler Prize. Her later projects, Resort 1 and Resort 2 are published by Shilt, Amsterdam, Loisirs is published by Diaphane and an new book, BLINK, will be published by Central St Martins.

Anna is Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham and leads the Fast Forward Women in Photography research project.

On episode 166, Anna discusses, among other things:

Reflections on the past 18 months
What she’s been working on during that period
Having a lot of ideas
Moving away from a ‘project based mentality’
The influences of people who taught her: Graham, Parr and Knorr
The exploration of the every day
41 Hewitt Road and the transition to focusing on domestic photography
Her use of text in conjunction with images
<

164 - Paul Reas

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 09:00:00 GMT

164 - Paul Reas

Paul Reas is a British social documentary photographer and educator, born in Bradford in the north of England in 1955. Until he recent retirement, Paul was the Course Leader of the Documentary Photography course (established by Magnum photographer David Hurn) at the University of South Wales in Cardiff, UK. He has worked commercially and editorially for many years and publishes and exhibits work internationally.

Paul is perhaps best known for photographing consumerism and various aspects of daily working class life in Britain, especially during the 1980s and 1990s and is a member of a group of hugely influential photographers commonly referred to as the second wave of British colour documentarists.

Paul has produced the books I Can Help (1988), Flogging a Dead Horse: Heritage Culture and Its Role in Post-industrial Britain (1993) and Fables of Faubus (2018). He has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery and London College of Communication, London; Cornerhouse, Manchester; and Impressions Gallery, Bradford. His work is held in the collection of the British Council and he is represented by the James Hyman Gallery in London.

On episode 164, Paul discusses, among other things:

Thoughts on retirement.
Being politically motivated during the Thatcher years.
Creativity sometimes being finite.
How he has started to paint and why he paints photographs.
Reflections on the future for documentary photography.
His life-long lack of confidence.
His father and learning about his WW2 trauma.
How his love of Northern Soul sparked an interest in photography.
Why from the start he photographed what he knew and what felt familiar.
The Valleys Project.
I Can Help.
Criticism of the portrayal of working class life.
Flogging A Dead Horse.

Referenced:

Andy Simpson
Eileen Gibson Cowan
Ian Walker
Ron McCormick
John Davies
Paul Graham
Martin Parr
Charlie Meecham
Bob Philips
Jem Southam

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

“Although I was photographing people, I never really think about my photographs as being totally about people. They’re about the systems that we’re all subjected to. Whether it’s consumerism or unempolyment or whatever, they try to be about those bigger themes. ”

163 - Jonas Bendiksen

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 09:00:00 GMT

163 - Jonas Bendiksen

Jonas Bendiksen’s sharply evocative images explore themes of community, faith and identity with unsparing honesty. He has made major bodies of work all over the world, at the same time as he always also photographs the daily rhythms of life at home. As well as many critically acclaimed long-form projects he has also produced significant work for many commercial and editorial clients.

Bendiksen was born in Norway in 1977. He began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum’s London office, before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former Soviet Union, a project that was published as the book Satellites (2006). His most recent book The Last Testament from 2017 told the story of seven men who all claimed to be the biblical Messiah returned to earth.

His editorial clients include magazines such as National Geographic, Stern, TIME, Newsweek, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian Weekend. On the commercial side, he has done projects for HSBC, Canon, FUJI, BCG, Red Bull and Land Rover.

Bendiksen became a nominee of Magnum Photos in 2004 and a member in 2008. He lives with his wife and three children outside Oslo, Norway.

His most recent book, The Book of Veles, was published by GOST Books in April 2021.

On episode 163, Jonas discusses, among other things:

His prediction for a ‘tsunami’ of synthetic imagery.
Not particularly enjoying the latter stage of his deception.
Chloe Miskin, the social media avatar he created to attack him.
The first time he became aware of Veles, the place.
The added layer of discovering that Veles was also a god and the actual Book of Veles, which was probably a forgery.
Seeing the project as his 'Frankenstein's monster'.
Curiosity.
Why he drew the line at allowing the story to be published in magazines.
Seeing the experiment as a visual Turing Test.
Why he allowed it to be screened at Visa Pour L’image in Perpignan.
How he created an AI generated 5000 word essay for the book.
The connection with previous project The Last Testament.
The Content Authenticity Initiative and other possible counter-measures.
What the future might look like.

Website | Instagram | Facebook

“It was like looking at my own little Frankenstein monster start coming to life. It’s ugly, it’s horrible, it’s frightening. And i was looking at this thing that I was creating and going ‘shit, we are in deep trouble here!’ And that’s what motivated me to do this.”

162 - Naomi Harris

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 07:25:00 GMT

Naomi Harris is a Canadian photographer and artist who seeks out interesting cultural trends to document through her subjects. Personal projects include Haddon Hall in which she photographed the last remaining elderly residents of a hotel in South Beach, Miami, Florida. For this work she received the 2001 International Prize for Young Photojournalism from Agfa/Das Bildforum, an honorable mention for the Yann Geffroy Award, and was a W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography finalist. Twenty years later the work is about to be jointly published in a book, also entitled Haddon Hall, by MAS and Void.

For her next project America Swings, Naomi documented the phenomenon of swinging over the course of 5 years (from 2003 to 2008) all over the United States, attending thirty eight swingers parties in the process. This project was realized in her first monograph released by Taschen in 2008 as a limited collectors edition. A trade edition was released in 2010. Artist Richard Prince interviewed Naomi for the book, which was edited by Dian Hanson.

Naomi then completed EUSA, a reaction to the homogenization of European and American cultures through globalization for which she visited and photographed American-themed amusement parks in Europe and European themed towns in America. The project was shortlisted for the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award in 2016 and ultimately published as a book by Kehrer Books in 2018.

Other accolades include being awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography in 2013, a Long-Term Career Advancement Grant from the Canada Council in 2012 and participating in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 2004.

For her most recent project, I Voyager, Naomi embarked on a 70-day canoe trip along the fur trader’s route in Ontario, Canada, accompanied by a guide and dressed in 19th century period costume inspired by the British painter Frances Anne Hopkins (1838 – 1919). The project includes self-portraiture and landscape photography and forms part of a much wider investigation into feminism, exploring the concepts of power, identity and sexuality.

Naomi currently divides her time between Toronto and the USA where she is studying for an MFA in Studio Art at the graduate school of the University of Buffalo in New York state.

On episode 162, Naomi discusses, among other things:

Thoughts on social media
Doing an MFA in Studio Arts and taking her practice in a new direction
Facing the double whammy of gender disparity and ageism
Having a cloud over her head like Charlie Brown
Her latest project, I Voyager.
New book Haddon Hall
America Swings
EUSA and the thorny topic of cultural appropriation
Exploring the theme of death

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

“My timing is always off. I’m always one day and a dollar short.”

161 - Photo London 2021 Special

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Featuring contributions from:

Tom Booth Woodger from Setanta Books
Amak Mahmoodian (Episode 121)
Kalpesh Lathigra (Episode 005)
Jenny Lewis (Episode 064)
Alys Tomlinson (Episode 123)
Robin Maddock (Episode 056)
Bryony Carlin
Matthew Finn (Episode 098)
Elizabeth Waterman
Michael Grecco (Days of Punk)

160 - Tom Wood

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 07:12:00 GMT

Tom Wood was born in 1951 in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He trained as a conceptual painter at Leicester Polytechnic from 1973 to 1976. Extensive viewing of experimental films led him to photography, in which he is self-taught. Between 1978 and 2003 Tom lived in New Brighton, Merseyside, where much of his most famous and celebrated work was produced. He left Merseyside in 2003 for North Wales where he still lives today.

Tom has published numerous books, including Looking for Love (1989), All Zones Off Peak(1998), Photie Man (2005) and Men / Women(2013). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, has been the subject of solo exhibitions at ICP, New York; Recontres d’Arles, France; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; MoMA, Oxford; FOAM, Amsterdam, The Photographers’ Gallery, London and the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford amongst others, and is held in the collections of major international museums. He has also worked with video on a daily basis since 1988, accumulating hundreds of hours of footage of family life. More recently he published Women’s Market with Stanley Barker, 101 Pictures, with RRB books and has another book of Irish Work soon to be released also by RRB.

Tom’s first major British show, Men and Women,was at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 2012. His first full UK retrospective was at the National Media Museum in Bradford in 2013 and his landscape photographs were exhibited for the first time in 2014.

On episode 160, Tom discusses, among other things:

Presenting people in the right light
His first move to New Brighton
Making notes from physist Richard Feynmann and James Joyce
The ‘accessibility’ of his work
His forthcoming book of Irish work
His first camera
Buying magazines and postcards from charity shops
The influence of found photos
The DPA work
Working in the chaos
Having the support of Martin Parr
The importance of his enduring collaboration with Padraig Timoney
Making the work out of love and not wanting to seem ‘professional’
‘Not Miss New Brighton’
Having hundreds of hours of video
The influence of underground film
The Termini book
Dog pictures

Referenced:

Thomas Zander
Richard Feynmann
James Joyce
Sean Hughes
August Sander
Bill Brandt
Josef Sudek
Paddy Summerfield

159 - Hannah Reyes Morales

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Hannah Reyes Morales is a Filipina photographer and National Geographic Explorer Based in Manila whose work documents tenderness amidst adversity. Her photography, both visceral and intimate, takes a look at how resilience is embodied in daily life. Hannah’s work explores the universal themes of diaspora, survival, and the bonds that tie us together. Publications include: The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek Japan and The Atlantic. Hannah is currently working on longer term projects, focused on safe-space making and care giving.

On episode 159, Hannah discusses, among other things:

How her practice had to change in response to Covid
Her Living Lullubies project
Covering Rodrigo Duterte's so-called drug war in The Philipines
Growing up largely indoors in Manila
Discovering photography
Her relationship with National Geographic and how she got there
‘Validating her own perspective’
Experiences of objectification, patriarchy, and sexism.
Her projects Roots From Ashes and Shelter From the Storm
Her focus on the notion of healing

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Living Lullubies

“Photography at its best is a bridge. It’s a way that we can connect to people, it’s an excuse to ask quesions, an excuse for a conversation.”

158 - Kirsty Mackay

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 06:07:00 GMT

Kirsty Mackay is an photographic artist, educator, activist and filmmaker whose research-led documentary practice highlights social issues surrounding gender, class and discrimination. She has an MA in Documentary photography from University of South Wales, Newport.

Her current book project The Fish That Never Swam, considers class and discrimination against working-class people. Combining first-person narratives with photographs, it takes Glasgow as a case study, looking at the root causes of the city’s poor health outcomes and lower life expectancy. Examining the relationship between the environment, government policy, historical trauma, and public health, it shifts the emphasis from individual life style choices to the effects that political policies have on our bodies. The book will be published in October 2021.

Kirsty’s first book, self-published in 2017, isMy Favourite Colour Was Yellow which challenges the stereotypes of girlhood. Kirsty set out to photograph girls with their pink possessions as a way to understand how this one colour has become dominant. Working over a five year period, making portraits of the girls in their bedrooms and on the high street, Kirsty has created a document of this time for girls growing up in the UK. After a period of documenting Kirsty began to probe deeper and the title of the book My Favourite Colour Was Yellow reflects the theme at the heart of the book - a lack of choice.

Kirsty’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Facing Britain group show at the Museum Goch, Germany, an observation of British Documentary Photography since the 60’s alongside works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox & David Hurn.

On episode 158, Kirsty discusses, among other things:

‘The Glasgow Effect’
Growing up feeling she could do anything
‘Poverty Porn’
‘Managed Decline’
‘Analysis after the event’
The ACE test
How just existing as a woman in photography puts some men’s noses out of joint
Coming across misogyny in photography
Calling herself an activist
Being reliant on other people’s stories
Her foray into video
How class needs to be included in the call for diversity

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | New book

“When I show some people my pictures they say ‘you’re not showing enough.’ And what I feel I’m fighting against is a middle-class viewpoint. There’s prejudice involved in that of how some middle-class people see working-class people and it fits with that prejudice to portray people as victims…”

157 - Igor Posner and Ben Brody

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:11:10 GMT

Igor Posner was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). After the fall of the Soviet Union, Igor 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. This 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. This first series of images No Such Records savors the strange solitude of the enigmatic region between California and Mexico; amid the streets, bars, night shelter hotels, and its disappearing night figures. After 14 years, Igor returned to St. Petersburg in 2006, taking up photography full time, which led to a book project entitled Past Perfect Continuous, published by Red Hook Editions in 2017. At present, Igor is based in New York and working on a long term project exploring psychological aspects of migration and the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods based on Russian immigrant communities in North America. Igor’s work has been shown in North America, Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia. He joined the Prospekt Photographers agency as a full member in 2011.

Ben Brody is an independent photographer, educator, and picture editor working on long-form projects related to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their aftermath. He is the Director of Photography for The GroundTruth Project and Report for America, and a co-founder of Mass Books. His first book, Attention Servicemember, published by Red Hook Editions and designed by Kummer & Herrman, was shortlisted for the Aperture - Paris Photo First Book Award. Ben holds an MFA from Hartford Art School's International Low-Residency Photography program. He resides in western Massachusetts.

On episode 157, Igor and Ben answer some of the following questions:

Can you pass on one or two useful tips when it comes to editing and sequencing images for a book? Is there something you can say about the decision making process?
When you begin a project, are you thinking about how it will end up - a book, exhibition etc? Does this influence your practice during the shooting phase?
When you feel creatively exhausted or uninspired or blocked what do you do to get yourself moving forward again?
What else, outside of photographery, are you passionate about? Do you have any other obsessions?
Do you rely on a number of distinct income streams to make a living, and if so how is your 'income pie chart' made up?
What is the most exciting photobook (or photographer) you've come across in the last year or so?
What's your favourite photobook, and why? Or is there a photobook that was particularly influential?
Where do you see the market for photo books heading in the next few years?
Which photographer's work has been most influential to you?
What advice should young photographers ignore? Are there recommendations you hear a lot that you totally disagree with?
How do you fund a project you are going to publish? Does the author have to contribute towards the costs?
What is the best fund raising strategy for a photo book?
What are some key things to be aware of when contacting a publisher. Any Do's and Dont’s?
Any suggestions for putting together a book proposal?
How do you choose the projects

156 - Lottie Davies

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:03:53 GMT

Lottie Davies was born in Guildford, UK, in 1971. She grew up in Surrey and was educated in Alton and Godalming. After a degree in philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland, she moved back to England to pursue a career in photography. She is currently based in Cornwall in the south west of England.

Lotties’ unique style has been employed in a variety of contexts, including newspapers, glossy magazines, books and advertising. In recent years she has developed her practice to employ moving image, audio, text and interactive installation. This mixed media approach is crystallised in her long-term project Quinn (2014-2020). Her work has garnered international acclaim with the image Quints, which won First Prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, with Viola As Twins, which won the Photographic Art Award, Arte Laguna Prize in Venice in 2011, and her collaboration on Dreams of Your Life with Hide & Seek/Film 4.0 which was BAFTA-nominated in 2012.

Lottie’s work is concerned with stories and personal histories, the tales and myths we use to structure our lives. She takes inspiration from classical and modern painting, cinema and theatre as well as the imaginary worlds of literature. She employs a deliberate reworking of our visual vocabulary, playing on our notions of nostalgia and visual conventions with the intention of evoking a sense of recognition and narrative. Sandy Nairne, former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, described Davies’ work as “brilliantly imaginative”.

On episode 156, Lottie discusses, among other things:

Her relocation from London to Cornwall
current project, Quinn
Why she sets her work in the past
The benefits of using an actor to represent her character, Quinn
How to acquire a baby for a shoot
Why her mother was born in a bucket
On photographers not being considered artists
Her column for Professional Photographer
‘Photobook Fails’
The six phases of the creative process
The Empathy Museum portraits
Memories and Nightmares

Referenced:

Laura Noble
Samuel J Weir
Forest School Camps
Matt Harris
Gordon MacDonald
Craig Easton
Dean Pavitt
Paul Samson
Gary Rhodes

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Mutton Row Books

“‘It’s not painting is it? You just press a button.’ Yes, all I do is press a fucking button. You numpty!”

155 - Matthew Genitempo and Bryan Schutmaat

Wed, 26 May 2021 11:18:24 GMT

Matthew Genitempo is an American photographer and book publisher currently living and making work in Marfa, Texas. He received his MFA in photography from the University of Hartford. Matthew was selected as one of PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers and received the LensCulture Emerging Photographer Award. His first book, Jasper, was chosen for the Hariban Juror’s Choice Award and short-listed for the 2018 Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photo Book Prize.

Bryan Schutmaat is an American photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Together, Matthew and Bryan co-founded and now run the Texas-based independent art book publisher, Trespasser.

On episode 155, Matthew and Bryan answer the some of the following questions:

Can you pass on one or two useful tips when it comes to editing and sequencing images for a book? Is there something you can say about the decision making process?
When you begin a project, are you thinking about how it will end up - a book, exhibition etc? Does this influence your practice during the shooting phase?
When you feel creatively exhausted or uninspired or blocked what do you do to get yourself moving forward again?
What else, outside of photographery, are you passionate about? Do you have any other obsessions?
Do you rely on a number of distinct income streams to make a living, and if so how is your 'income pie chart' made up?
What is the most exciting photobook (or photographer) you've come across in the last year or so?
What's your favourite photobook, and why? Or is there a photobook that was particularly influential?
Where do you see the market for photo books heading in the next few years?
Which photographer's work has been most influential to you?
What advice should young photographers ignore? Are there recommendations you hear a lot that you totally disagree with?
How do you fund a project you are going to publish? Does the author have to contribute towards the costs?
What is the best fund raising strategy for a photo book?
What are some key things to be aware of when contacting a publisher. Any Do's and Dont’s?
Any suggestions for putting together a book proposal?
How do you choose the projects you are going to publish?
Where do you see the market for photo books heading in the next few years?

Matthew: Website | Instagram
Bryan: Website | Instagram
Trespasser Books: Website | Instagram

154 - Craig Easton

Wed, 12 May 2021 07:28:47 GMT

Craig Easton’s work is deeply rooted in the documentary tradition. He shoots long-term documentary projects exploring issues around social policy, identity and a sense of place. Known for his intimate portraits and expansive landscapes, his work regularly combines these elements with reportage approaches to storytelling, often working collaboratively with others to incorporate words, pictures and audio in a research-based practice that weaves a narrative between contemporary experience and history.

Craig has made work about women working in the UK fish processing industry (Fisherwomen); about the inter-generational nature of poverty and economic hardship in Northern England (Thatchers Children); about social deprivation, housing, unemployment and immigration in Blackburn; and about how the situation in which young people throughout the UK live, influences their aspirations.

A passionate believer in working collaboratively with others, Craig conceived and led the critically acclaimed SIXTEEN project with sixteen leading photographers exploring the hopes, ambitions and fears of sixteen-year-olds all around the UK. This Arts Council funded project was exhibited in over 20 exhibitions throughout 2019/2020 culminating in three simultaneous shows in London.

Craig is a regular visiting lecturer at universities and runs workshops both in the UK and internationally.

In addition to his personal documentary and art projects, he continues to shoot for editorial & advertising clients worldwide including The National Health Service, Visit Britain, Land Rover, Heathrow Airport, Wagamama, Mazda and John Lewis.

Craig was recently named as Photographer of The Year 2021 in the annual Sony World Photography Awards for his project Bank Top, shot in Blackburn in the north of England.

On episode 154, Craig discusses, among other things:

His recent Sony Awards win
The winning project, Bank Top
Large format film
His early years on The Independent newspaper
Thatchers Children
Fisherwomen
Commissioned work
SIXTEEN

Referenced:

Walker Evans
Dorothea Lange
Lewis Hine
Winslow Homer
Hill And Adamson
Robert Moyes Adam
Anne Braybon
Lottie Davies
Jillian Edelstein
Stuart Freedman
Kalpesh Lathigra
Roy Mehta
Simon Roberts

Website | Emmett (2010); Lick Creek Line (2012); Lago (2015); and, most recently, 12Hz. He has received grants or awards from Light Work; San Francisco Camerawork; the Aaron Siskind Foundation; and the Friends of Photography and was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2019. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica and Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin.

Ron lives in Eugene with fellow photographer Danielle Mericle and their son Charley.

On episode 153, Ron discusses, among other things:

Why he switched to digital for 12Hz
Not wanting to romanticise the landscape
Feeling like it was a risk
Not intending to make a book and then actually making a book
His interest in incorporating sound
Lago and other books
How working with images that weren’t his taught him a lot about the book making process
Lick Creek Line
Why he doesn’t photograph people
Nausea and the inherent flaws in the education system
Why metaphor should be deployed with caution

Referenced:

Joshua Bonnetta
Mike Kelley
Roe Ethridge
Danielle Mericle

Website | Instagram

“To some degree it’s just practice. It’s like playing an instrument - you practice, and if you don’t practice you get rusty. And then you have to start all over again.”

152 - Christian Patterson

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 07:03:36 GMT

American photographer Christian Patterson was born in Wisconsin and lives in New York City. His conceptually grounded, narratively driven, visually layered work has been described as novelistic, subjective documentary of the historical past, and often deals with themes of the archive, authorship, memory, place and time. It includes photographs, drawings, paintings, objects, video and sound.

Christian moved from Brooklyn, New York to Memphis, Tennessee in 2002 to seek out his photographic hero William Eggleston. They became friends and Christian ended up working for him at the William Eggleston Trust, under the stewardship of William’s son, Winston.

In 2005, Christian completed his first project, Sound Affects, a collection of photographs that explore Memphis utilizing light and color as visual analogues to sound and music. In 2008, Sound Affects was published as a book by Edition Kaune, Sudendorf (Cologne). Christian’s second monograph the critically-acclaimed Redheaded Peckerwood was published by MACK in 2011 and was almost universally lauded as one of the best books of the year by numerous noted international photography critics. It was nominated for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award and won the prestigious 2012 Recontres d’Arles Author Book Award. The book featured in The Photobook: A History, Volume 3, co-edited by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr.

Christian’s third book, Bottom of the Lake was published in 2015. He is a Guggenheim Fellow (2013) and winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey (2015). His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and J. Paul Getty Museum among others. Christian has lectured, mentored and taught widely and is represented by Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin.

On episode 152, Christian discusses, among other things:

His current project, Gong Co. and how it came about.
Discovering William Eggleston during his early years in New York.
Going down to Memphis to meet him and ending up working with him.
Addressing some of the myths and misconception around Eggleston.
Reheaded Peckerwood - Badlands as an influence.
Going to Nebraska where the original events occurred.
The influence and success of the book.

Referenced:

William Eggleston
Terence Malick
Stephen Shore
David Bowie

Website | Instagram

“You’re expressing yourself and you’re taking part in the larger conversation that’s happening in your field. I wanted to take part in the conversation and I wanted to feel like I was influencing, shaping or expanding that conversation in a way.”

151 - Tania Franco Klein

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 06:46:46 GMT

Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990) started photography while gaining a BA in Architecture in her home town of Mexico City, which led her to pursue a Masters degree in Photography at the University of the Arts, London.

Her work is highly influenced by a fascination with social behavior and contemporary concerns such as leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, emotional disconnection, the obsession with eternal youth, the American dream in the Western world and the psychological impact of these concerns on everyday life.

Tania’s work has been reviewed and featured internationally in publications such as ARTFORUM, L.A Times, I-D Magazine, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Aperture Foundation, and The British Journal of Photography, and she has been commissioned by The New York Times, The New Yorker, FT weekend, New York Magazine, Vogue and Dior, among others.

Tania has been exhibited widely both in solo and group shows across Europe, the USA, and Mexico, including at Photo London, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and the Aperture Gallery in New York City. Her latest exhibition, Proceed To The Route , which showcased a wide selection of her latest work, was presented by ROSEGALLERY and received enthusiastic reviews both in Mexico City (2019) and Los Angeles (2020).

She was recently selected by W Mag as one of 9 photographers to follow and has won Sony World Photography Awards in two consecutive years, The Lensculture Exposure Awards, Lensculture Storytelling Awards, and the Photo London Artproof Schliemann Award as the best emerging artist during the Photo London fair in 2018. Her first publication Positive Disintegration (2019) was nominated for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award.

On episode 151, Tania discusses, among other things:

The nomadic lifestyle
Why she recreated her old room in her grandmother’s house in her studio
The psychology of capitalism
Her book, Positive Disintegtration
The role of technology in the sense of inadequacy
How the process of doing self portraits came about
Her use of colour
Her approach to exhibition design
Bookmaking workshops - pros and cons
The tendency of some men to dispense advice to female artists
Current project, Proceed To The Route
Selling prints
Why she loves doing commissions

Referenced:

Byung-Chul Han
Kazimierz Dąbrowski

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“With photography you have the opportunity to be more absurd and to still make sense and connect with people throughout these bizarre events happening, and that’s what makes it more rich.”

150 - Alejandro Cartagena

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 10:26:41 GMT

Alejandro Cartagena was born in the Dominican Republic in 1977 and lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Alejandro’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Cartier foundation in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several prestigious museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, among others.

Alejandro is a self-publisher and co-editor and has created several award wining titles including A Small Guide to Home Ownership, The Velvet Cell 2020, Carpoolers, Self-published with support of FONCA Grant, 2014, Suburbia Mexicana, Daylight/ Photolucida 2010. Some of his books are in the Yale University Library, the Tate Britain, and the 10×10 Photobooks/MFH Houston book collections among others.

Alejandro has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award at the London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo Leon in Mexico among others. His work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper among others.

On episode 150, Alejandro discusses, among other things:

How divorce led him to Stoicism
Parenthood being the ‘most difficult thing you can bear’.
Living in multiple paradigms
His current excitement over poetry
Why he started ‘vandalising’ archive images
Learning about photography through working in an archive
Being an outsider as a kid
His new book A Small Guide to Home Ownership
Wanting to make some books that are pop songs, not symphonies

Referenced:

Depeche Mode, Blashphemous Rumours
Guillermo Kahlo
Eugenio Espino Barros

Website | Instagram | Facebook

“There’s nothing new about documentary photography, you just take pictures of what’s there, you know, but the opportunity of making it poetic or lyrical is to confront ideas that weren’t meant to be seen with each other. And that’s what’s exciting for me sometimes.”

149 - Paul Graham

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 08:27:52 GMT

Influential English photographer Paul Graham has published three survey monographs, along with 17 other publications.

In 1981, he completed his first body of work, A1 - The Great North Road, which he later self-published as a book, re-printed in 2020 by Mack. The series of colour photographs captured life along England’s ageing arterial road, the A1, from the city of London to Edinburgh’s main post office. The pioneering series went on to receive critical acclaim, and was followed by Beyond Caring, a visual record of unemployment in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, and Troubled Land, which depicted landscapes in Northern Ireland during the years of the Troubles. Paul’s use of colour film in the early 1980s, at a time when British photography was dominated by traditional black-and-white social documentary, had a revolutionising effect on the genre.

Paul has since gone on to produce over 12 further bodies of work, incuding New Europe, hailed in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s influential reference The Photobook: A History as “a key work of the new European photography”, and perhaps his most celebrated series, the twelve-volume collection entitled A Shimmer of Possibility, created in collaboration with steidlMACK, which summarizes Paul's interest in calling attention to overlooked activities or places. The book won the 2011 Paris Photo Book Prize for the most important photography book published in the past 15 years. The work was included as part of a 2015 survey of Paul’s trilogy of series’ from America, entitiled The Whiteness of the Whale, which was exhibited at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Paul’s work has been the subject of more than eighty international solo exhibitions and has been shown in the Italian Pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennale, Switzerland's national Fotomuseum Winterthur and at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. He was included in Tate's Cruel and Tender survey exhibition of 20th century photography, and a European mid career survey exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen, which toured to the Deichtorhallen, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Paul has been awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the Hasselblad Award, the W. Eugene Smith Grant, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Royal Photographic Society Award. In the early 2000s he moved to New York City where he settled and still lives with his partner and their son.

On episode 149, Paul discusses, among other things:

But, Still It Turns, the current ICP show he curated, with a tie-in book published by Mack.)
Having shows shut down due to Covid.
Discovering photography.
His first book project, A1 - The Great North Road.
The radical nature of shooting colour at the time.
The ‘dance with the world’, as the highest calling of the medium.
Beyond Caring and Troubled Land.
New Europe.

148 - David Yarrow

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:09:40 GMT

David Yarrow was born in 1966 into the Scottish Yarrow shipbuilding dynasty - founded in 1865 by his grandfather, Sir Alfred Yarrow, who had come from humble origins in East London.

David took up photography at an early age and as a 20-year-old university undergraduate found himself working as a photographer for The Times on the pitch at the 1986 World Cup Final in Mexico City. On that day, David took the famous picture of Diego Maradona holding the trophy and as a result was subsequently asked to cover the 1988 Winter Olympics, among other events.

On his return, David was met with two job offers at the same salary. One was from Getty Images and the other from Nat West bank. To the enormous surprise of the people at Getty, but to the profound delight of his parents, he chose the latter, which led to a successful and lucrative finance career on Wall Street and ultimately building a billion dollar hedge fund. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s, in the aftermath of divorce and the financial crash that David returned to photography.

David’s distinctive and immersive black and white images of life on earth have earned him an ever growing following amongst art collectors. His huge works, produced in Los Angeles, are on display in leading galleries and museums across Europe and North America and he is now recognised as one of the best selling fine art photographers in the world with limited edition prints regularly selling for tens of thousands of pounds at auction.

In September 2019, Rizzoli published David’s second book with foreword was written by global NFL star Tom Brady and an afterword written by American cultural icon Cindy Crawford. All royalties from this book will be donated to conservation charities Tusk, in the UK and WildAid, in the US.

David’s position in the industry has been rewarded with a wide range of advisory and ambassadorial roles and in the spring of 2020, David was appointed a Global Ambassador for Best Buddies – one of America’s most established children’s charities.

In 2018 and 2019 David’s work raised over $4.5m for philanthropic and conservation organisations. At Art Miami in December 2019, his photograph The Wolves of Wall Street broke new records. One print, signed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, featuring the real Wolf of Wall Street – Jordan Belfort – sold for $200,000. The proceeds went to conservation NGOs supported by DiCaprio.

At the start of 2020, David was in Australia documenting the devastating bush fires that have destroyed communities, wildlife and wildlands. Using the striking and poignant images that he captured of the effects of the fire, Yarrow launched the Koala Comeback Campaign to support the recovery efforts in Australia. As of early June, the campaign has raised $1.4m. In April, during the Covid-19 pandemic, David joined the Art For Heroes campaign, to raise money for the NHS. He released a print – Our Pride – with all proceeds going to HEROES. For every print purchased, David donated an Our Pride print to an NHS worker. The campaign has surpassed its original target of £1m.

On episode 148, David discusses, among other things:

Working through the Covid crisis.
Monetization and the moment ‘the penny dropped’ with a picture of a shark.
Lessons learned from Breaking Bad.
Avoiding ‘vertical integration’ and the need for FIGJAM.
Why it’s important to keep edition sizes small.
Lessons learned from his mum (a sculptor).
America by definition being a country of entrepreneurs.
The twin filters of authenticity and commerciality.
The Catch-22 of getting gallery representation.
How his

147 - Jason Eskenazi

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 08:54:34 GMT

Jason Esekenazi is a photographer, curator and co-founder of the photobook publishing community Red Hook Editions. He lives in Queens, New York, where he grew up and went to university, taking a degree in psychology and American literature at Queens College.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led Jason out of New York into the wider world and after trips to Germany and Romania he travelled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union. So began over a decade of return trips to the region which eventually culminated in Jason’s first book, Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, which won Best Photography Book in Pictures of the Year International in 2008. Using the fairy tale as a framework, Jason took the title of his book from Alice in Wonderland, and likens the breakup of the Soviet Union to the end of childhood. Wonderland ended up being the first in a trilogy of books spanning 30 years worth of work. Each volume consists of three sections numbered one to nine and the numbering of the images is consecutive across the whole trilogy. The second book was Black Garden, shot within the vast geographical and mythical world known to ancient Greece from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus, including Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, and Sicily, as well as New York City. The book uses Greek mythology as its framework and concentrates on three main themes: subjugation of women, domination over the animal kingdom, and self-destruction through war. The final book in the trilogy, published simultaneousluy with Black Garden in 2019, is Departure Lounge, which investigates how we depart from reality, from friends, and from ourselves and completes the cycle by revisiting the territory and some of the characters of the first book, drawing on Jason’s extensive archive from his decade long travels through Russia.

Jason has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant. His work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. In 2004 Jason In 2004 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia to make a series of large format color portraits called Title Nation with Russian colleague Valeri Nistratov which was published in 2010. In 2004 -2005 Jason organized a Kids with Cameras workshop in the old city of Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children, which toured many U.S. cities.

For much of 2008 and 2009 Jason took a job as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to earn some money and to obtain health insurance. He created and co-edited a new independent magazine called SW!PE which showcased the artwork of museum guards. While assigned to the museum’s Robert Frank exhibition Looking In, Jason also began the creation of the book The Americans List: By the Glow of the Jukebox, which asks over 250 photographers to name and talk abouit their favourite photograph from Frank’s seminal work, The Americans.

Jason was also the International Curator/ Creative Director for the Bursa Photo Fest in Turkey for its first 2 years and a co-founder and editor of DOG FOOD, a newspaper blending Cynic Philosophy and Photography.

On episode 147, Jason discusses, among other things:

Why he found the idea of working in the USA scarier than in a far flung war zone.
Waiting for chance to give you something.
The in

146 - Nanna Heitmann

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 08:48:47 GMT

Nanna Heitmann (b. 1994 in Ulm, Germany) is a German/ Russian documentary photographer, currently based in Moscow, Russia.

Her work often deals with issues of isolation – physical, social and spiritual – as well as the very nature of how people react to and interact with their environs.

Nanna has received awards that include the Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award and the Ian Parry Award of Achievement and has been listed on The 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch 2020.

Nanna’s work has been published by National Geographic, TIME Magazine, M Le Magazine du Monde, De Volkskrant, Stern Magazine and she has worked on assignments for outlets including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post and Stern Magazine.

Nanna joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2019.

On episode 146, Nanna discusses, among other things:

How she first got into photography

Weg vom Fenster
Hiding from Baba Yaga
Russian melancholy
Going from college to Magnum Photos in one move
Her coverage of the Covid story in Moscow and in more remote regions
Utrish and connection to nature and remote communities
The pressure of being a Magnum nominee

Referenced:

William Albert Allard
Emeson Lake & Palmer
Alex Majoli
Lorenzo Meloni
Yuri Kosyrev
Andrei Polikanov
Allesandra Sanquenetti

Website | Instagram | Facebook

Links relating to Magnum Photos controversy:

FStoppers piece on the latest developments in the ongoing Magnum Photos controversy, as mentioned in the podcast intro.
Guardian piece on the initial story: Magnum reviewing archive as concerns raised about images of child sexual exploitation.
Guardian piece a week later on David Alan Harvey’s suspension: Magnum suspends photographer over harassment claim.
CJR piece by Kristen Chick: Magnum’s Moment of Reckoning.
Magnum’s statement in response.
Statement calling for collective accountability against sexual harassment in photography by 647 signatories
Magnum’s

145 - Evgenia Arbugaeva

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:57:32 GMT

Evgenia Arbugaeva was born and spent her early childhood in the secluded town of Tiksi, located on the shore the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia in Russia’s Arctic North. Though she is now based in London and recently lived for a number of years in New York City, she has spent much of the past decade returning to and exploring the region surrounding her birthplace, discovering and capturing the remote worlds she finds there and the isolated characters who inhabit them. Her work is often located within the tradition of magical realism, and her approach combines documentary and narrative styles to create a distinctive visual iconography rooted in real experience but resonant with fable, myth and romanticism.

Evgenia's early series Tiksi (2010) and Weather Man (2013), which featured Slava, a lone Russian meteorololgist willingly marooned on a remote weather station, reflect her romantic fascination and childhood nostalgia for the Arctic. Between 2018-19, supported by a National Geographic Society Storytelling Fellowship, Evgenia travelled to three more outposts in the extreme north of Russia, creating three further chapters: Kanin Nos, a lighthouse on the isolated Kanin peninsula populated only by a young couple and their dog; Dikson, a now derelict ghost town where Evgenia captured the spectacular Northern Lights, and finally the far eastern region of Chukotka home to the Chukchi community, who still maintain the traditions of their ancestors, living off the land and sea with Walrus and whale meat as the main components of their diet. Collectively these stories are entitled Hyperborea and are featured in her first major solo exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London, now sadly closed under the latest UK lockdown.

By way of geographical contrast, Evgenia also travelled to Tanzania in 2016 to document a former malaria research center, producing a story entitled Amani, the name of the place in question.

As well as being a National Geographic Society Storytelling Fellow, Evgenia is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, Leica Oskar Barnack Award and the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Grant. Her work has been exhibited internationally and appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Time, Le Monde and The New Yorker magazines among others.

On episode 145, Evgenia discusses, among other things:

Memories of early life in Tiksi
First interests in photography at school
Living with reindeer herders for a year
Moving to New York
Her 3 month journey on supply ship to explore
Slava, the subject of Weather Man
The importance of forming relationships with her subjects
Kanin Nos
Dikson and the aurora borealis
Amani

Website | Instagram | Facebook

“The act of taking pictures is very invasive, you know, it’s a very harsh thing to do to someone and I am very much aware of that. So I want to soften it as much as I can for people, to the point where it won’t be a about photography or if it’s about photogra

144 - The Year In Review 2020

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 08:11:56 GMT

Featuring:

Amak Mahmoodian
Ellie Davies
Alys Tomlinson
Michal Iwanowski
Tom Oldham
Jon Tonks
Ken Grant
Tom Craig
Roger Ballen
Phillip Toledano
Barry Lewis
Jodi Bieber
Sabiha Çimen
Tasneem Alsultan
Stephen Dupont
Tim Page
Andy Sewell
Aletheia Casey
Jesse Lenz
Michael Christopher Brown
Tom Stoddart

143 - Tom Stoddart

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:59:30 GMT

Tom Stoddart is an award-winning British photojournalist whose work has appeared in many of the most pretigious international magazines and newspapers. He is widely regarded by editors and his peers as one of the world’s most experienced and respected photographers. His international frontline assignments have included almost every major conflict and natural disaster over four decades, from wars to earthquakes and from the fall of the Berlin Wall to pandemics. During a long and varied career he has witnessed such international events as the war in Lebanon, the election of President Nelson Mandela, the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the wars against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Tom’s photographic career began with the Berwick Advertiser, a local newspaper in his native North East of England, before his personal ambition to move up to the big league of the national press in Fleet Street, sent him to London where he quickly impressed picture editors on the foremost newspapers and magazines and won frontline assignments during the troubled 80s, culminating in Desert Storm, the first Gulf War in 1990.

In 1992 Tom was seriously injured in heavy fighting in Bosnia. After a year of recovery, he produced a powerful feature on the aftermath of the Mississippi floods and, later that year, a World Press Photo award-winning photo-essay on the harsh training regime of Chinese Olympic Child Gymnasts.

In 1997 Tony Blair gave Tom exclusive behind the scenes access to his election campaign as Labour swept to victory after 18 years of Conservative government in the UK. More recently he documented Prime Minister David Cameron’s daily life at 10 Downing Street. His acclaimed in-depth work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic blighting sub-Saharan Africa won the POY World Understanding Award in 2003. In the same year his pictures of British Royal Marines in combat, during hostilities in Iraq, was awarded the Larry Burrows Award for Exceptional War Photography. A year later his book iWITNESS was honoured as the best photography book published in the USA.

Tom is the recipient of Lifetime Achievement awards from this peers and his new book, Extraordinary Women: Images of Courage, Endurance and Defiance was be published in October 2020 by ACC Art Books and Iconic Images.

On episode 143, Tom discusses, among other things:

Reflections on 50 years in the business
His new book, Extraordinary Women
Going back through decades of contact sheets
The story behind two of his most iconic images - Meliha Varesanovic and Gordana Burazor
His route to Fleet Street from the Berwick Advertiser
The ambition to tell stories his way and the stripping down of equipment that changed his style
Common traits of photojournalists
Why photography students are not being well prepared for the industry
Why he still believes in the power of the still image

Referenced:

Robin Morgan, Iconic Images
Dennis Hussey
Don McFee
John Downing
Terry Fincher
Chris Smith
Sally Soames
Ken Lennox
Marie Colvin



Website | Instagram | Facebook

“It isn’t about you. You know, this isn’t art. It’s not about look at me, it’s about look at this.”

142 - Michael Christopher Brown

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:46:36 GMT

American photographer Michael Christopher Brown was raised in the Skagit Valley, a farming community in Washington. After moving to New York City in 2005, he joined the Italian photo agency Grazia Neri in 2006. He then moved to Beijing, China, in 2009 and over the next two years put together a series of works from road and train trips across the country.

In 2010 Michael began taking pictures with an iPhone, driving around eastern China in his Jinbei van. Since then he has produced iPhone photographs in Libya, Egypt, Congo, Central African Republic, Cuba and Palestine. Michael's ability to capture critical moments with an iPhone has led to his involvement with Time, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic's Instagram platforms.

In 2011, Michael spent seven months in Libya photographing the Libyan Revolution, exploring ethical distance and the iconography of warfare. He covered several battles along the coast, was ambushed several times in Eastern Libya and injured twice. In early March, on the frontline near the eastern town of Bin Jawad, he was shot in the leg during a Government offensive. Six weeks later, while covering the Siege of Misrata, he was injured by incoming mortar fire, losing nearly half the blood in his body and requiring two transfusions. His colleagues Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were both killed in the same attack and Guy Martin was also badly injured. Michael returned to Libya twice in 2012 and was the subject of the Michael Mann directed HBO documentary series Witness: Libya.

A contributing photographer at National Geographic since 2005, Michael is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and other publications. Since 2006 his photographs have been published in dozens of international publications. He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2013 and was an associate from 2015 until leaving the agency in June 2017.

Michael's book Libyan Sugar won the Paris Photo First Photobook Award and the International Center of Photography's 2017 Infinity Award for Artist's Book.

In 2015 and 2016 Michael produced Paradiso, a multimedia project on the electronica music and youth scene in Havana, Cuba, part of which was exhibited in 2017 during the Cuba IS show at the Annenberg Space for Photography.

In 2018 Michael released the book Yo Soy Fidel, which follows the cortège of Fidel Castro, former Cuban revolutionary and politician, over a period of several days in late 2016.

Michael has also documented conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2012 and was based in Goma from late 2012 until early 2014. A three book series of images from that time, both his and those he collected from numerous Congolese photographers, is forthcoming, entitled Congo Sunrise.

On episode 142, Michael discusses, among other things:

His new podcast, The Searcher, and the reasons for starting it.
The controversy surrounding his story on Skid Row in L.A. for National Geographic.
The PTSD that took nearly six years to manifest itself and the efficacy of psychedelic drugs as a treatment.
His thoughts on the inclusion of gory images of war in his book Libyan Sugar.
His forthcoming bo

141 - Jesse Lenz

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 08:55:21 GMT

Jesse Lenz is a self-taught photographer and multidisciplinary artist. As an illustrator he has created images for the most well-respected publications around the world, including TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many others. He is the founder and director of Charcoal Book Club, Charcoal Press,and the Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review. From 2011-2018 he also co-founded and published The Collective Quarterly and The Coyote Journal. He lives on a farm in rural Ohio.

Jesse just released his first photobook, entitled The Locusts, published under the imprint that he founded, Charcoal Press. Featuring black and white images that transport the reader to rural Ohio where his children run wild in the fields, build forts in the attic, and fall asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes. The microcosmic worlds of plants, insects, animals, and children create a brooding landscape where dichotomies of nature play out in front of his growing family. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Locusts depicts a world in which beautiful and terrible things will happen, but offers grace and healing within the brokenness and imperfection of life.

On episode 141, Jesse discusses, among other things:

His imprint, Charcoal Press
His new book, The Locusts
Learning how to be present
Being the singer in a heavy metal band
His ethos that if you want something you have to build it yourself
Creating community
Never having had a real job
Sustainable subject matter
If you build it, they will come

Referenced:

Jonathon Levitt
Andrew Wyeth



Website | Instagram | Facebook

“The work that you’re making, it really should be the thing that you can’t wait to get out and do. It should be something that never feels like a job… if you do that you’re always gonna have work even if its the same subject matter over and over, because you’re infatuated with it. Infatuation and obsession is the superpower of the human race… and that’s where amazing things happen. Like, the Wright brothers were infatuated with flying and they did something crazy.”

140 - Aletheia Casey

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 08:38:48 GMT

Aletheia Casey is an Australian photographic artist currently living in London, England. She has been published in and worked with The Guardian, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, BBC London and BBC World, Australian Associated Press and numerous other international publications.

Aletheia has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (Australia), Museum Bélvédère (Heerenveen, Holland), Photofusion (London), The Perth Centre for Photography (Australia), The National Geographic Society (London),  Foto8 (London), among other places, and currently has an exhibition at the Le Mois De La Photo in Grenoble, France until November 29th 2020.

She was named as one of '31 photographers to watch' by the British Journal of Photography and was shortlisted for the PHMuseum Woman Photographer's Grant in 2018. In the same year Aletheia won the Judge's Commendation for the Iris Award at the Perth Centre for Photography and was a finalist for the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Award. In 2015 she was named a winner of The Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographer Award for the UK, and has twice been a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize.

Aletheia is a founding member of Australian photographer’s collective Lumina. She completed her Masters of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography in 2016 through the London College of Communication and graduated with distinction. She is a photography lecturer on the Masters degrees at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and London College of Communication.

On episode 140, Aletheia discusses, among other things:

Her current show and the pleasures of collaborating with good curators.
After the Apologyand the ‘inherent emotional quality in the landscape’.
No Blood Stained the Wattle and the use of colour palettes.
Inflicting ‘violence’ onto her film.
The Dark Forgetting.
Her TedX talk about healing and the need for acknowledgement.
Generational culpability and the question of having the right to tell certain stories.
Discovering photography by chance.
Why she loves teaching and mentoring.
Which Way is North and the loss of self resulting from motherhood.
Not caring about what other people think.
Responding to the Australian bush fires and the Covid pandemic.
Current ongoing projects, My Eyes are Blue and my Heart is Grey and Where Does the Sky End and Space Begin?*

*There is no definitive answer but some might say 100km.

Referenced:

Miki Nitidori
Photography Rules: Essential Dos and Don'ts from Great Photographers, by Paul Lowe
Prof Lyndall Ryan
The Heath was a winner of the International Photobook Award 2012 and is included in Martin Parr’s The Photobook: A History Vol. III. His work is found in private and public collections including The V&A Museum, The MAST Foundation, The Museum of London, Columbia University Art Collection, Eric Franck Collection, The Hyman Collection and the National Media Museum.

He was born in East London and grew up in the commuter belt north of the city, a place part rural and part suburban. He now lives in East London again. His work explores the permeable quality of the boundaries we put between things.

The Heath is about the paradox of a place managed to feel wild. Something Like a Nest explores the gap between the countryside as an idea, somewhere often imagined and depicted as an escape from modernity, and the messier, enmeshed landscape we find there. His latest book, Known and Strange Things Pass, just published by Skinnerboox, looks at the cables carrying the Internet across the Atlantic and costal locations they link. Exploring, in these places where the digital network is concentrated, a literal and metaphorical entwining of worlds we think of as separate - the ocean and the Internet, the close and the distant, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological.

Andy’s work is defined by the relationships created between pictures. It is driven by a fascination with the contradictory quality of seeing – the feeling that as we look closer at things they become more lucid, more themselves, and yet, and at the same time, more entangled, unknowable, and mysterious.

On episode 139, Andy discusses, among other things:

His new book, Known and Strange Things Pass
Having two bodies
The importance of chance
Noticing what’s there
Researching the project
The feeling of embodiment from being in water
His Previous book,Something Like a Nest
First book, The Heath

Referenced:

Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton
Seamus Heaney
Hiroshi Sugimoto



Website | Instagram | Twitter

“As I grew up, I was taught the more closely you see something, the more you know about it. The more data we have on it, the less mysterious it becomes. I find the opposite is true. The closer you look at stuff the more mysterious, the more entangled it becomes.”

138 - Tim Page

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:35:38 GMT

British photojournalist Tim Page was born in 1944 and left England at 17 to travel across Europe and the Middle East en route to India and Nepal. He found himself in Laos at the time of the civil war and ended up working as a stringer for wire service United Press International. From there he moved on to Saigon where he covered the Vietnam War for thenext five years working largely on assignment for Time-Life, Upi, Paris Match and Associated Press. He also found time to cover the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967. The role of war-photographer suited Tim’s craving for danger and excitement. He became an iconic photographer of the Vietnam War and his pictures were the visual inspiration for many films of the period. The photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 movie Apocalypse Now was based on Tim.

The Vietnam War was the first and last war where there was no censorship, the military actively encouraged press involvement and Tim went everywhere, covering everything. He was wounded four times, once by friendly fire and on the last ocassion when he jumped out of a helicopter to help wounded personnel and the person in front of him stepped on a landmine, sending a large piece of shrapnel into Tim’s brain. He was pronounced DOA at the hospital. He required extensive neuro-surgery and spent most of the seventies in recovery.

It was while he was recovering in hospital in spring 1970 that he learnt that his best friend and fellow photographer Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood actor Errol, had gone missing in Cambodia. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s Tim’s abiding obsession was to discover the fate and final resting place of his friend and to erect a memorial to all those in the media that were either killed or went missing in the war. This led him to found the IndoChina Media Memorial Foundation and was the genesis for the book Requiem. With his friend Horst Faas, photo editor for Associated Press and double Pulitzer Prize winner, Tim co-edited the book and commemorated the work of all the dead and the missing, from all nations, who were lost in the thirty-year struggle for liberation. Requiem the exhibition is now on permanent display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

Tim spent 5 months in 2009 as the Photographic Peace Ambassador for the UN in Afghanistan and is the recipient of many awards. He has been the subject of many documentaries, two films and is the author of ten books, including a yet to be released hand-made publication entitled Nam Contact, produced by recent Small Voice guest Stephen Dupont, and available soon in a limited edititon of nine copies. In 2010 Tim was named one of the '100 Most Influential Photographers Of All Time' by Professional Photographer magazine. Tim now lives in Brisbane, Australia.

On episode 138, Tim discusses, among other things:

How he fell into photography
Strengths and weaknesses
The importance of the darkroom
The lack of outlets for photojournalism today
Having a ‘palette of film’
Being part of a golden age of photojournalism
Why he kept going back to Vietnam after numerous injuries
Being mentored Larry Burrows
Spending the 70’s taking a lot of LSD
Going back as catharsis in the 80’s
His obsession with trying to find out what happened to his friend Sean Flynn

Referenced:

Philip Jones Griffith
Don McCullin
Nick Ut
Horst Faas
Adam Ferguson

137 - Stephen Dupont

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 07:08:50 GMT

Stephen Dupont is an Australian artist, photographer and documentary filmmaker working mostly on long-term personal projects. Born in Sydney in 1967, Stephen grew up in the western suburbs and Southern Highlands under tough social conditions and displacement, with social worker parents, who were full-time carers of state wards. Stephen is recognised around the world for his concerned photography on the human condition, war and climate. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that are fast disappearing from our world.

Stephen’s work has earned him some of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a 2005 Robert Capa Gold Medal citation and the 2015 Olivier Rebbot Award from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. In 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

In 2017 Stephen’s one-man theatrical show Don't Look Away world premiered at the Museum of Old & New Art (MONA) in Tasmania as part of Mona Mofo (MONA's festival of Music and Art). Performances continued at Sydney's Eternity Playhouse Theatre, the Museum of Contemporary Art MCA and at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Stephen has twice been an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial for his photography, with commissions in The Solomon Islands (2013) and Afghanistan (2012). He holds a Masters degree in Philosophy and is regularly invited to give public talks in Australia and around the world about photography, film and his life. His work has been featured in more or less all of the world’s most prestigious magazines and he has held major exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image, China’s Ping Yao and Holland’s Noorderlicht festivals.

Stephen’s handmade photographic artist books and portfolios are in some of the world's leading collections, including, the National Gallery of Australia, The New York Public Library, Berlin and Munich National Art Libraries, Stanford University, Yale University, Boston Athenaeum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Joy of Giving Something Inc.

On episode 137, Stephen discusses, among other things:

Reassessing his archive during Covid
How and why he first began making artists books
The question of how one labels and thinks about themselves
Still having the wanderlust for travel
His new environmental project, Are We Dead Yet?
His unusual childhood and the impact of his dad’s death when he was 13
His desire to escape the suburbs and to travel
His early travels and how India was an influence on him becoming a photographer
Why live music photography was a good training ground
The influence of Don McCullin
Why he came back from his first war in Sri Lanka feeling like he’d failed
Dealing with the emotional fall out of witnessing conflict
His love of Afghanistan and the close shave he had there
HIs first book, Ste

136 - Tasneem Alsultan

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 07:19:54 GMT

136 - Tasneem Alsultan

Born in the US and raised between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia where she is currently based, Tasneem Alsultan is an investigative photographer, storyteller and global traveller. With an inquisitive eye and camera at hand, she offers intimate and unique perspectives into the everyday lives of her subjects, telling their stories from her heart while striving to humanize and connect their realities to her audiences. Her work largely focuses on documenting social issues and rights-based topics in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf region, aiming to challenge stereotypical perceptions of the Middle East and portray a region and a people that do not conform to expectations. Covering stories primarily for The New York Times and National Geographic, Tasneem documents ground-breaking developments in Saudi and the surrounding region, including most recently, the lifting of the driving ban for Saudi women.

Selected as one of 10 recipients of the Magnum Foundation/ Prince Clause/ AFAC grant in 2015, Tasneem began working on her project Saudi Tales of Love which has been published in Time’s Lightbox, and later exhibited at Paris Photo,  PhotoKathmandu, and screened at Visa Pour L’Image, Perpignan in 2016. Tasneem was selected by the British Journal of Photography among the best 16 emerging photographers to watch, and PDN’s 30 photographers to watch in 2017. She was a finalist in the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards in Contemporary Issues. She joined Rawiya, the first all-female photography collective from the Middle East. In 2018 she joined the Canon Ambassador program as the program’s first Arab female photographer and was selected as as one of the 12 recipients of the Joop Swart Masterclass, part of the World Press Photo, Netherlands. In 2019, Tasneem was selected as a recipients of the Catchlight Fellowship to continue her work on Saudi women. She has also received an honorable mention for the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism.

Having focused her research on anthropological studies of Saudi women, Tasneem holds a Master of Art in Social Linguistics from Portland State University and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics from King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi.

On episode 136, Tasneem discusses, among other things:

Her recent lockdown adventures.
Her academic parents and formative years in England at a Catholic school.
Getting her first camera aged 9.
Facing criticism for presenting an unvarnished version of her region.
Getting married, having children very young and becoming a divorcee.
Her project Saudi Tales of Love and why she included images of her personal diaries.
Transitioning to documentary from wedding photography.
Working for National Geographic.
Being told she would never be a good photographer.
Stubborness.
Her Seeing Saudi project.
Trying to represent the Saudi women she photographs.

Referenced:

Tanya Habjouqa
Mohamed Somji
James Estrin
Shahidul Alam
Newsha Tavakolian
Ed Kashi
Hafiz: Guardians of the Qu’ran
How the headscarf ban in Turkey impacted her life
Her portrait project Urban Refugees and why she shot it at night
Her masters thesis on Subaltan studies
Attending the WPP Foundation Joop Swart Masterclass
Winning 2nd in the World Press Photo awards
Photographers she likes
Her thoughts on becoming a new Magnum Photos nominee

Referenced:

Tanya Habjouqa
Jason Eskanazi
Paul Klee. Angelus Novus.
Walter Benjamin
Philip Montgomery
Ksenia Kuleshova
Tasneem Alsultan
Sohrab Hura
Valentina Piccinni and Jean Marc Caimi
Andres Gonzalez, American Origami

Instagram | Facebook

“I don’t want to be a tourist in my subjects’ life. They become part of my life, which I really need. I like it. It gives me a rich society. I’m feeding myself with them. I am one of them, I feel like. ”

134 - Jodi Bieber

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:57:35 GMT

South African photographer Jodi Bieber began her professional career covering the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa for The Star Newspaper under chief photographer Ken Oosterbroek, having attended three short courses at David Goldblatt’s Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg.

In 1996, she was selected to participate in the World Press Masterclass in the Netherlands and this opened the door to a career travelling the world on assignment for international magazines and NGO’s. At the same time, she has always pursued her own long-term personal projects.

Jodi has won numerous international prizes,among them 10 World Press Photo awards, including the overall prize in 2010. She has produced four books, Between Dogs and Wolves – Growing up with South Africa, 2006; Soweto, 2010; Real Beauty, 2014 and Between Darkness and Light, Selected Works: South Africa 1994-2010. The work has been exhibited widely internationally.

Jodi also mentors students, lectures, and holds photographic workshops all over the world.

On the centenary anniversary of women's suffrage in the UK, the Royal Photographic Society named her as one of their Hundred Heroines and her portrait of Bibi Aisha in the top 100 photographs to influenced the previous decade.

On episode 134, Jodi discusses, among other things:

Her playful lockdown project with husband Francois
Growing up in South Africa
Her first break with The Star newspaper
Adding her voice to her projects
Her first book, Between Dogs And Wolves
Collaboration with the people in her pictures
How she took her World Press winning portrait of Bibi Aisha
Getting fewer assignments
Shooting a fashion spread for Dior
Her portrait project, Quiet

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“Where you aim your camera, how you edit your work, how your publication chooses the images: there isn’t the set truth. And I quite like interpreting things. I quite like adding my voice to my projects. That was important for me.”

133 - Barry Lewis

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 09:03:48 GMT

Barry Lewis is a British photographer and filmmaker who for several decades has worked internationally for numerous prestigious publications from Life magazine to National Geographic. Having originally studied theoretical chemistry, Barry won a scholarship from the Royal College of Art to do an MA in photography and subsequently began his career in style when he won the Vogue Award and worked as a staff photographer for the magazine on a salary of £10 per week.

In 1981, Barry co-founded Network Photographers a London-based co-operative photo agency for photojournalists and documentary photographers, based loosely on the Magnum Photos model.

As well as photojournalism and portraiture, Barry has directed over 20 documentaries, commercials and art films. His work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Museum of London and The Photographers Gallery, London.

Notable exhibitions and awards include Positive Lives (1993), a book and international exhibition about living with AIDS and the World Press Award’s Oskar Barnack Medal for humanitarian photography (1990). In 2019 his images from Butlins in the 1980s were shown at Turner Contemporary as part of the “Resort” show.

Since 2010 Barry has worked with musician David Toop and singer Elaine Mitchener to produce the mixed-media production “Of Leonardo” for the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice. A new version, choreographed by Dam Van Huynh, now tours internationally with a performance at the Purcell Room on the South Bank in September 2018.

Barry has published numerous photobooks including Blackpool 1984-1989 (Café Royal books), Butlins Holiday Camp 1982 (Café Royal books), Soho in the 1990s (Café Royal books), Vaguely Lost in Shangri-la: 14 years of the Glastonbury Festival (Flood Publications) and Miami Beach 1985-2000 (Hoxton Mini Press, 2019).

On episode 133, Barry discusses, among other things:

Chemistry, teaching and the Royal College
Coming of age in the 60s
Starting Network Photographers
Adventures on assignment in Romania
Winning the Oksar Barnack Award for his Copsa Mica story
Albania
Miami Beach project
Photographing strangers
Making films
Organising his archive
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Alabama
BLM and London during lockdown

Referenced:

Bill Brandt
Tony Ray Jones
Homer Sykes
W. Eugene Smith
Mike Abrahams
Mike Goldwater
John Sturrock
Martin Slavin
Sue Trangmar
Colin Jacobson
Mary Ellen Mark
Daniel Meadows

Website (in progress) | Instagram | Facebook

“I toured China with Elton John and Watford football club. You can’t make these things up. And there were no other photographers. So you ha

132 - Phillip Toledano

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:07:12 GMT

Phillip Toledano is a New York-based British artist born in 1968 in London, to a French Moroccan mother and an American father. He grew up in London and Casablanca, received a BA in English literature from Tufts University in Boston and embarked upon a career in advertising before abandoning that plan in favour of photography.

Phillip considers himself a conceptual artist: Everything starts with an idea, and the idea determines the execution. Consequently, his work, much of which is of a socio-political nature, varies in medium, ranging from photography to installation, sculpture, painting and video.

Phillip's commercial and editorial work has appeared in numerous high profile publications such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, GQ, Interview, Wallpaper, The Sunday Times magazine, The Independent Magazine and Le Monde.

His installation project America, the Gift Shop was shown at the Center for photography at Woodstock as well as the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2010. The premise: If George Bush’s foreign policy had a souvenir shop, what would it sell? His more recent mixed media project is called Kim Jong Phil, in which Phillip explores artistic narcissism and self-delusion by taking pre-existing dictatorial art-paintings from North Korea and statues of assorted dictators and has these works re-created in China, as large format oil paintings and bronze sculpture, in each instance, replacing the great leaders with himself.

Phillip has published six books: Bankrupt, Twin Palms (2006), Phonesex, Twin Palms (2008), Days with my Father, Chronicle (2010), A New Kind of Beauty, Dewi Lewis (2011), The Reluctant Father, Dewi Lewis (2013), and When I Was Six, Dewi Lewis (2015). His work has been shown internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions.

On episode 132, Phillip discusses, among other things:

The current situation in New York
His new video series, Donald At Home
His response to the current Black Lives Matter protests
His project on fighter pilot helmets
Income pie chart, revenue streams - collecting watches etc.
His ongoing new Deep State project
Being politcal
His upringing and the tragedy of his sister’s death
Advertising days and how it taught him about ‘cognitive brutality’
Kim Jong Phil
Maybe
His transition from advertising to artist
Feeling constrained in his ideas

Referenced:

Giorgetto Giugiaro

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

“I always feel like my ideas are so obvious; they’re just a step in front of me. Where as you look at some people and you think ‘God, what bus do they have to catch to get to that planet!’ And I find that admirable, and I’m sort of jealous that I’m not going that far or I’m not being extreme enough. But, you know, you can’t prescribe e

131 - Roger Ballen

Wed, 27 May 2020 12:28:41 GMT

Born in New York in 1950, Roger Ballen is a unique and influential American artist whose strange and extreme photographic works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.

For nearly 40 years, Roger has lived and worked in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. His five decade career to date began in the documentary tradition but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Marginalized people, animals, found objects, wires and childlike drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Roger’s images. He describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.

Robert Young coined the term "Ballenesque" to refer to the constituent factors of Ballen's work in their "various shifting combinations and relations” that mark and identify it as uniquely his.

In his 20s, uninterested in the idea of commercial photography, Roger set about deciding on a career for himself and elected to pursue geology. He enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he received a PhD in Mineral Economics in 1981. He permanently settled in Johannesburg in 1982, where he worked as a self-employed mining entrepreneur until 2010. This profession took him into the South African countryside in which he travelled to remote small villages called "dorps" and rural areas referred to as the "platteland", in which he photographed the marginalized white population who, once privileged by Apartheid, were now isolated and economically deprived.

At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. The occupants and interiors, with their distinctive collections of objects, within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind.

After 1994, Roger no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg. Throughout the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Roger in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.

The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by dolls or dummy parts or, where people did appear, it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals.

His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen ha

130 - Tom Craig

Wed, 13 May 2020 09:49:45 GMT

British-born photographer Tom Craig began his photographic journey as a reportage and documentary photographer, working for clients such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Independent newspaper, before a commission from Vogue magazine to shoot a fashion story came “like a bolt from the blue” and altered the course of his career irrevocably. Since then Tom has travelled all over the world for both editorial and commercial clients, largely defying categorization by any specific photographic genre. His projects have spanned portraiture, fashion, travel and advertising commissions in over a hundred countries and his work has featured in the world’s most high profile international publications, among them Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ and The Sunday Times magazine, and in campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Alice Temperley, Mr. Porter, Persol and Oxfam.

Tom is also well known for his long and unique professional collaboration and close friendship with the writer A.A. Gill, which spanned 25 locations across the globe until it was brought to an untimely end by Gill’s death in 2016.

Tom has either won or been nominated three times for 'British Magazine Photographer of the Year’ three times, exhibited for five consecutive years at the National Portrait Gallery, served as Photographer-in-Residence for the Royal Geographical Society, was named The Telegraph "Travel Photographer of the Year”, participated in the prestigious World Press Master Class and was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's prize for a notable achievement in the art of photography by someone under 35.

On episode 130, Tom discusses, among other things:

What he was up to before lockdown
Having a ‘studio’ of people - the pros and cons
Approaching photography as a business
The notion of personal work
Distillation, creating a voice and a language…
…And translating that into images
How his commission from vogue came as a “bolt from the blue” changed everything
Diversity and avoiding pidgeonholes
Trying to live life to the full and expressing that photographically

Referenced:

Arthur Elgort
Irving Penn
Diana Vreeland
David Bailey
Richard Avedon
Rinko Kawauchi
Martin Parr
Josef Koudelka
David La Chapelle
Robert Capa
Chris Steele Perkins
Alex Shulman
Bay Garnett
Sophie Baudrand
Garry Winogrand
Aidan Sullivan
Cheryl Newman

Website | Instagram | Twitter

“Have as much fun and enjoyment and engagment with all of it, as often as you can and as thoroughly as you can, a

129 - Special: Recent member-only content compilation

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 10:19:21 GMT

It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped this week, people. I don’t even wanna talk about it, to be honest. So here, in place of the usual one-to-one chat, is a special sampler of recent content from the member-only podcast, featuring Michal Iwanowski, Sian Davey and Ken Grant. Sign up for a 7 day free trial at pod.fan

On episode 129:

Michal Iwanowski (Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter) and Ken Grant (Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook) answer 20 bonus questions and I have a lockdown check-in with Sian Davey (Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram).

128 - Ken Grant

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 07:05:54 GMT

Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967 and at 12 years old bought his first camera - a polaroid - from money he had saved working in the school holidays for his joiner father.

He went on to study photography at technical college, where he discovered and devoured numerous classic photobooks in the library, and then at West Surrey College of Art and Design, in Farnham, where he was mentored or lectured by such luminaries of British photography as Martin Parr, Chris Killip, and Paul Graham.

Ken is best known for having dedicated much of his career to documenting daily working class life in and around Liverpool. Since the 1980s, he has photographed his contemporaries in the city and engaged in sustained projects both in the UK and more widely, in Europe. Ken tends to work slowly, returning again and again to the same places and becoming a familiar sight to the people who gather there. The books that have resulted have often not been published until many years later. His first monograph of the Liverpool pictures, The Close Season, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2002. In Spring 2014, Ken published a second monograph, drawing from the same body of work entitled No Pain Whatsoever (whose title derives from a story by Richard Yates), published by Swedish book designer Gosta Flemming under his imprint, Journal. His most recent book, focussing on images shot on and around a munical land fill site is entitled Benny Profane and was published last year by RRB Books.

Ken’s photographs are held in important collections of photography, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum in Essen and other international public and private collections.

Ken was the course leader of the famous BA in Documentary Photography course at the University of Wales, Newport between 1998 and 2013 and since then has been a lecturer in the MFA Photography course at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

On episode 128, Ken discusses, among other things:

Teaching in Belfast and living on the Wirral
Getting the feedback of his peers
Being back home and making work there
Buying himself his first camera - a polariod - at 12
Discovering the library at technical college
Taking a long time between shooting and making a book
Taking on board Josef Sudek’s advice to ‘Rush slowly’
His most recent book, published by RRB Books, Benny Profane

Referenced:

Paul Seawright
Donovan Wylie
John Berger
Daniel Meadows
David Hurn
Tobias Zielony
Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Julian Germain
Empire – a journey across the South Atlantic exploring life on four remote British Oveaseas Territories. The book was hailed by Martin Parr as one of his best books the year.

Jon’s work is now in a number of private collections, both in the UK and abroad, including The Hyman Collection of British photography, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas.

On episode 127, Jon discusses, among other things:

His recent cruise ship experience
His book Empire
Having to make your own fun
Enjoying the disconnect
Using limitations to be more creative
The Vanuatu cargo cult story
How his project about pubs has been shelved by Corona virus
Justified naps
Reactions to the current crisis

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

“I think when you go somewhere with the intention of making work and you’ve got these parameters - which in this case would be the sea around the island you’re on - it kind of gives you these limitations and it helps me to be more creative, I think. it’s a bit like when people say just stick with one body and one lens. Those limitations make you more creative, I think.”

126 - Me on The Candid Frame

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 08:12:44 GMT

On episode 126, me and Ibarionex discuss, among other things:

Our shared experiences
Learing to type
Podcasting (obviously)
Depression
Self criticism
His relatively recent ADHD diagnosis
My ongoing photography project, Indicative Only
The art of carrying on

Website | Instagram | Facebook

125 - Tom Oldham

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 08:30:12 GMT

Tom Oldham is primarily a portrait photographer, shooting famous and talented people such as well known musicians and sports stars, both for publications such as Mojo magazine and for big-brand commercial clients.

In 2016, on the Summer solstice, Tom stayed up for 40 hours and shot a portrait per hour from midnight to midnight, for a project called The Longest Day. The whole process was captured in this great little short film and Tom then printed and distrubuted a free newspaper of the images.

His personal project, The Last of The Crooners, a portrait of the Palm Tree pub in Bow, east London and the aging musicians who perform there, was awarded the 2018 Sony World Photography Award for Portraits in the Professional Category.

His most recent project, Shoot An Arrow and Go Real High, focusses on some of the characters in the ballroom scene. One of the portraits from that project was recently featured in the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition.

On episode 125, Tom discusses, among other things:

Doing big jobs
The ‘rennaissance’ of film
How he got into photography
Avoiding a signature style
His new project Shoot An Arrow and Go Real High
Self-doubt
The Last of The Crooners
How winning a Sony Award with it had an impact and why he nearly didn’t enter
Competitions
His photobooks for schools initiative, Creative Corners
The Longest Day project

Website | Instagram | Twitter

“it comes to a larger point I suppose about really believing in your own work and that none of it actually reallly matters that much. And who really cares? Everyone is so - rightly or wrongly - self-absorbed, what does it matter if I’m having a wobble and doubt about what I feel about something? Really what does it matter? So surely it’s more avantageous to get the fuck on with it!”

124 - Michal Iwanowski

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 10:16:41 GMT

Michal Iwanowski was born in Poland and has for some years lived in Cardiff, Wales where he graduated with an MFA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. His work combines elements of the documentary tradition with a conceptual approach. In his deeply personal projects, Michal often sets his protagonists against nature and explores the relationship between landscape and memory; marking the silent passing of otherwise insignificant individuals and histories. In 2009, he won the Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographers award.

In 2012 Michal retraced on foot the three-month, 2,200km trek his grandfather made from Russia to Poland after escaping from a Russian prison camp during the second world war. Maps, family portraits and extracts from the memoir his grandfather wrote combine with Michal’s own photographs to create a meta-narrative about family, belonging, history, home, war and individual willpower. The resulting book Clear of People, was published by Brave Books in 2017, and was longlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2018.

In 2016, Michal embarked on a similarly epic walk when partly inspired by the clamour of the Brexit debacle, and partly by a piece of graffiti he had seen many years earlier reading ‘Go Home Polish’, he decided to take the demand literally and set off from his home in Cardiff to walk the 1900km back to the town of his birth in Poland. Tracing a straight line through a map of Europe the journey took him through Wales, England, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and lasted 105 days. The resulting photographs appeared at the Peckham24 festival in London as an exhibition entitiled Go Home Polish which was also longlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

On episode 124, Michal discusses, among other things:

Brexit
Clear of People and how doing the book nearly killed
How it changed his photography
Not shooting and having nothing to say for four years
Being ‘broken’ by his M.A.
Go Home Polish
Characters he met on his journey

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“When I started doing my Masters I though photography had to be loud. Like David La Chapelle loud… but for me to arrive at a point where I look at these images now and I feel depth and some sort of profoundness in them, that’s what I found was the biggest achievement for me as a photographer - to actually appreciate the magic in the mundane and the simplicity. Not trying to make a show, not trying to be loud and asking for attention. That was wonderful.”

123 - Alys Tomlinson

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 07:51:34 GMT

Alys Tomlinson is an award-winning editorial and fine art photographer based in London. Having grown up in Brighton on England’s south coast, Alys went on to study English Literature and Communications at the University of Leeds. After graduating she moved to New York City for a year where she was given her first commission for the Time Out guide books. She returned to London to study photography at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Alys recently completed a part-time MA in Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage (Distinction) at SOAS, University of London, which ties in with her long-term, personal project about pilgrimage, published as a photobook by GOST in 2019 entitled Ex Voto.

Alys was named Sony World Photography Awards, Photographer of the Year 2018 and in 2019 her short film, Vera, was shown at the Rencontres d’Arles as part of the New Discovery Award where it won the Public Prize. The full, feature-length version, co-directed with Marie Cécile-Embleton, is due to be completed and hopefully released later in 2020.

Alys combines commissioned work for editorial, design and advertising clients with personal work, which she publishes and exhibits. She is represented by the gallery Hacklebury Fine Art.

On episode 123, Alys discusses, among other things:

Earning a living
How she got into photography
Her new York Adventure as a 20 year old
How her Ex Voto project came about
Her first trips to Lourdes
Why she did an MA especially to enrich the project
How she had a breakthrough with large format B&W
Why winning the Sony award changed her life
Getting gallery representation
The book and the Kickstarter campaign
The film she has made about Vera

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“The truly original comes from the way you think about it. You might have a great idea. You’ll find out someone has done something about that in some way, probably. It’s almost impossible to be completely original in terms of subject matter. But I suppose it’s how you interpret it.”

122 - Ellie Davies

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 08:22:09 GMT

Ellie Davies (Born 1976) lives in Dorset and works in the woods and forests of Southern England. She gained her MA in Photography from London College of Communication in 2008 and has been working in the UK’s forests for the past nine years, making work which explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual.

Ellie is represented by Crane Kalman Brighton Gallery in the UK, Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan, Susan Spiritus Gallery in California, A.Galerie in Paris and Brussels and Brucie Collections in Kiev.

Her most recent series, Fires, was selected as a Finalist in the Klompching NY Fresh 2019 Summer Show and received a Gold and two Bronze awards in the Moscow International Photography Awards 2019 and Winner in the 12th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards: Professional Landscapes and Seascapes category.  Fires was also selected Winner of the 12th Pollux Awards: Professional Fine Art Series, and Professional Conceptual Nominee: Fine Art Photography Awards 2019 and awarded Winner in the Nature, Environment and Perspectives category of the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019.

Stars 8 was awarded ‘Fine Art Single Image Winner’ in the Magnum Photography Awards 2017 and in The Celeste Prize 2017 and was exhibited at The Photographers Gallery in London and Bargehouse OXO London in October 2017. Ellie was also a Selected Winner in AI-AP’s American Photography 33 (2017) and Landscape Winner in PDN’s The Curator Awards 2016. The six winning artists were exhibited at Foley Gallery in New York in 2016. Her Stars series was also selected for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2016 and received The People Choice Award.

Ellie’s has had many solo exhibitions internationally and her work is currently on display in a touring exhibition for The Imperial Hospital Trust, currently at St Mary’s Hospital in London, until late February 2020.

On episode 122, Ellie discusses, among other things:

Her recent ‘dry spell’.
Her first landscape seriess, Silent, Dark and Deep
The ‘Twilights’ exhibition at the V&A museum
How the word ‘banal’ during a crit changed everything
Getting into the woods
An insight into process
The gallery system and getting in to it
Building nests
Artist Statements
Her series’ Stars and Come With Me

Referenced:

Tony Boxall
Francesca Woodman
Sarah Moon
Cindy Sherman
Richard Kalman
Tom Hunter
Trudie Stephenson
Simon Brown

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“I wanted to find a way of having a relationship with the landscape. And the way I’ve done that is to try and spend time in a place and have a process of

121 - Amak Mahmoodian

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:52:55 GMT

Amak Mahmoodian, was born in Shiraz in Iran in 1980, the year of the establishment of the Iranian revolution. She currently lives in Bristol, England, where she teaches on the BA and MA courses in photography at the University of the West of England. She graduated from the University of South Wales with a practice-based PHD in photography in 2015 and prior to that received her degree and an MA from the Art University of Tehran.

Amak’s first book, Shenasnameh, was jointly published in 2016 by IC Visual Labs and RRB books and sold out it’s 300 copy print run within two months. The work has been widely exhibited internationally and the book has won multiple awards and has been featured in publications including TIME, Foam magazine and the Guardian.

Amak’s second book, Zanjir, which means ‘chain’ in Persian, was recently released through the same joint publishers and hinges partly on an imagined conversation between herself and the Persian princess and memoirist Taj Saltaneh (1883 - 1936).

On episode 121, Amak discusses, among other things:

The context behind the Iranian revolution
Why she grew up ‘really fast’.
Having ‘the best, most wonderful people’ as teachers at university
Iranian women having a voice whilst being silent
Her route through a BA an MA and a PhD
Her first book, Shenasnameh
Why she can’t go back to Iran
Her latest book Zanjir
The challenges of shooting in Tehran
The importance of poetry

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“Each project is a chapter in my life. It always starts from the heart. And I just think, ok I’m going to work on that. And it’s a narrative of my own life. But at the same time because of the situation and the place I’m from, this work becomes political in a sense. Or I can say it pertains to a wider social issue which is related to my country.”

120 - The Year In Review 2019

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 08:51:15 GMT

Featuring:

Lyndsey Addario
Chris-Dorley Brown
Matthew Finn
Zed Nelson
Me
Poulomi Basu
Hannah Starkey
Todd Hido
Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb
Andrea Modica
Simon Norfolk
Irina Rozovsky
Ed Panar
Sohrab Hura
Mark Steinmetz
Ian Weldon
Lisa Barnard
David Moore
Daniel Meadows
Anders Petersen
Nick Waplington
Lua Ribeira

119 - Lua Ribeira

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 12:55:30 GMT

Lua Ribeira was born in 1986 in the autonomous community of Galicia, in the north of Spain. She received a BA Hons in Media Studies at the University of Vigo in 2009 and in 2010 she moved to Barcelona where she studied graphic dsesign and as a result discovered an interest in photography. Adopting it as a vocation, Lua moved to the U.K. where in 2012 she enrolled on the Documentary Photography course, at the University of South Wales She graduated with honors in 2016 and just two years later, Lua joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee.

Her practice, characterized by its collaborative nature, is the result of extensive research and an immersive approach to the subject matter. To quote from her bio on the Magnum website, Lua “is interested in trespassing social barriers, and breaking the structural separation in relation to particular communities. By exploring the perception of life generated outside the strictly socially acceptable, she aims to question the morals and values she grew up by.”

Lua is the recipient of the 2015 Firecracker Grant, the 2017 Magnum Graduate Photographers Award, and the 2018 Jerwood Photoworks Award. Her series Noises In The Blood, about Jamaican dancehall culture in the U.K. was published in book form by Fishbar in 2017. The series was also published in the book Firecrackers, Female Photographers Now (2017) Thames and Hudson Ltd.

On episode 119, Lua discusses, among other things:

Her current project in Morocco
Her route to photography via graphic design
Noises In The Blood
Rebelliousness and her ‘snapshot’ aesthetic
Aristocrats
Subida Al Cielo
Being a Magnum Photos nominee

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“I guess you get to be a good photographer, or a good anything, by going deep enough into the hole. Dare to question things and question yourself just to go deep enough in your own questions. And also being rebellious, I think.”

118 - Nick Waplington

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 10:08:54 GMT

Nick Waplington is a photographer and a painter, who divides his time between New York, where he lives with his English professor wife and their young son, and London where his older son lives and where has a studio and live/work space.

He has produced many photobooks over a thirty year career, collaborating with established publishers such as Aperture, Cornerhouse, Mack, Phaidon and Trolley, producing low-fi, zine style publications in small numbers and more recently self-publishing through Jesus Blue, the imprint he founded this year with his friend, the designer Jonny Lu.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and The Photographers' Gallery in London, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions, In 1993 he was awarded an Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Gallery of Australia, among others.

Nick travelled extensively during his childhood as his step-father (who he thought at the time was his biological father) worked as a scientist in the nuclear industry. He studied art at West Sussex College of Art & Design in Worthing, Trent Polytechic in Nottingham and the Royal College of Art in London. From 1984, Nick would regularly visit his grandfather on the Broxtowe Estate in Aspley, Nottingham, where he began to photograph the surroundings and some of the families who lived there. He continued with this work on and off for the next 15 years and from it came two books, Living Room and Weddings, Parties, Anything, as well as numerous exhibitions.

Other bodies of his work include Safety in Numbers (1997), a bleak study of the ecstasy drug culture in the mid-1990s; The Indecisive Memento, a global road trip where the journey itself was the artwork (1999); Truth or Consequences (2001), a pictorial game based on the history of photography using the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico as a backdrop, inspired by the rules of the 1950s television show; and You Love Life (2005), in which he uses pictures taken over a 20-year period to construct an autobiographical narrative.

Nick worked on a major book project with the fashion designer Alexander McQueen during 2008/2009, called Working Process (2013), the title referring to both McQueen's working process as a fashion designer and Waplington's working process as an artist making photo books. In March 2015 this project became the first one-person exhibition by a British photographer in the main exhibition space at Tate Britain in London.

Nick participated in the photography collective This Place, founded by Frédéric Brenner, contributing the book Settlement (2014), a study of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, portrait and landscape photographs taken with a large format camera.

While continuing to make photographic works Waplington has since 2010 devoted much of his time to his practice as a painter.

On episode 118, Nick discusses, among other things:

His life NY-LON life: dividing his time between the U.S. and London
Painting and photography
Recent work based around Plato’s allegory of the cave
His latest book Hackney Riviera and why he self-published it
Being ‘on it’ and the “all day, every day” practice
How it all began in the school darkroom
Grammar school, post-punk and not having a plan B
His Living Room project
Discovering the hidden truth about his father
Moving to Jerusalam to photog

117 - Anders Petersen

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 08:42:08 GMT

Anders Petersen was born in 1944 in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1961, aged 17, he went to live in Hamburg to learn German and to try to write and paint. Five years later he met the man who would become a mentor, close friend and his biggest influence, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm. Inspired by one of Christer’s photographs, which he saw in a magazine he picked up in a barber shop, Anders began his photographic education, enroling at Strömholm’s school of photography in Stockholm.

In 1967 Anders returned to Hamburg where he began photographing in a bar called Café Lehmitz. Over a three year period, he produced one of his most well known and celebrated bodies of work. In 1970 he had his first solo exhibition in the bar with 350 photographs nailed to the walls and the work was later published as a book.

In 1984 the first book in a trilogy about locked instituations was published. The three books were about people in a prison, a nursing home, and a psychiatric hospital.

During 2003 and 2004 Anders was appointed Professor of Photography in the School of Photography and Film at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. He regularly gives workshops and has exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and in the USA. He has received numerous grants and awards since the seventies and in 2003 he was elected the Photographer of the Year by the international photo festival in Arles.

In 2006 he was shortlisted as one of four for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2007 he received the special jury prize for his exhibition Exaltation of Humanity by the third International Photo festival in Lianzhou, China. In 2008 he received the Dr. Erich Salomon Award and in 2009 The Arles Contemporary Book Award went to his joint project with JH Engström, From Back Home.

On episode 117, Anders discusses, among other things:

Why it’s still no easier to form relationships

How he is looking for the innocent child inside everybody

His ‘bourgeois’ childhood and going to Hamburg at 17

How a picture he saw in a barbershop began his photographic career

His memories of his first visit to Cafe Lehmitz

The influence of Ed van der Elsken’s book Love on the Left Bank

Why questions are more interesting than the answers

It being ‘unbelievably important’ to retain a childlike innocence

His work in a psychiatric hospital and a prison

His new book Stockholm and the problem of getting ‘home blind’

Referenced:

Christer Strömholm

Ed van der Elsken

Website | Facebook

“I was drawn to people who were honest in their dreams; in their wishes; in their desires; in their lust for life. And their energy. I was looking for their energy. I was looking for myself.”

116 - Daniel Meadows

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 07:23:14 GMT

Photographer, documentarian and digital storyteller Daniel Meadows (b. 1952) has spent a lifetime recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through pictures, audio recordings and short movies.

He is best known for his 1973-74 journey around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus when he travelled 10,000 miles in a converted double-decker and made 958 portraits in "free studio" sessions on the streets of 22 different British towns and cities. This is a project he revisited in the 1990s, photographing again some of the subjects of those portraits for his widely published series National Portraits: Now & Then.

His pioneering community storytelling project BBC Capture Wales (2001-08) encouraged many hundreds of people across Wales to embrace the arrival of the digital age in pop-up workshops by making their own two minutes of TV, framing their memories and pictures into digital stories, "multimedia sonnets from the people". Capture Wales won a BAFTA Cymru in 2002.

Daniel taught the documentary photography course with David Hurn in Newport (1983-94); also photojournalism (1994-2001) and digital storytelling (2000-2012) at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies where he also completed his PhD in 2005. In the 1990s he taught photojournalism workshops in the emerging democracies of eastern Europe, also in India and Bangladesh. After 2000 he travelled repeatedly to Australia and the USA lecturing about his pioneering work in participatory media.

His photographs and (more recently) his short films have been exhibited widely both in the UK and on the continent of Europe. Solo shows include the ICA London (1975), The Photographers' Gallery London (1987) and the National Media Museum Bradford (2011). His books include: Living Like This – Around Britain in the Seventies (1975,) Nattering In Paradise – A Word from the Suburbs (1987), National Portraits – Photographs from the 1970s (1997), and The Bus – The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973-2001 (2001).

A detailed and scholarly overview of Daniel’s early work, Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s by Val Williams, was published in 2011.

His photo-essays done in the industrial north of England in the 1970s are celebrated in the Café Royal Books boxed set edition Eight Stories (2015).

The Daniel Meadows Archive was acquired in March 2018 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, where there is an exhibition of Daniel’s work entitled Daniel Meadows: Now and Then until November 24th this year, and the accompanying book, Now And Then: England 1970 - 2015, was recently published by the Bodleian.

On episode 116, Daniel discusses, among other things:

- His show at the Bodleian library and how they acquired his entire archive.
- His formative experience of boarding school.
- Being taught the science of photography at Manchester Poly. And meeting Martin Parr there.
- HIs Greame Street project.
- Photographing Butlins holiday camp with his friend, Martin Parr - and starting to shoot colour.
- The June Street project, also with Martin Parr.
- His love for digital storytelling and a loathing for ‘antisocial media’.
Memories of his English road trip by double decker bus and of finding some of the people he photographed 25 years later.
- Always thinking his work was 'rubbish' and not feeling a success.

115 - David Moore

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:11:50 GMT

David Moore is a London based photographic artist once described as belonging to "the second wave of new colour documentary in Britain". He has exhibited and published internationally and has work held in public and private collections. David has worked as a photographer and educator since graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, in 1988 and he is currently the Course Leader of MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster

David’s 2017/18 project ‘Lisa and John’ responds to the archive of his influential 1988 graduation project, Pictures from the real world - which was published as a book in 2011 - and employs theatre, installation, and collaboration. Lisa and John was launched at Format International Photography Festival in 2017, and included a theatrical play, The Lisa and John Slideshow, written and directed by David. The entire Lisa and John Project was exhibited and performed in London and Belfast in 2018 and received widespread acclaim.

Writer, Sean ‘o’ Hagan, wrote: “Moore is such a master of colour that he made me think more than once what William Eggleston's photographs would have looked like had he been born in the north of England rather than the American south.”

David’s current practice addresses agency and a critique of documentary as a genre using installation and theatre as a means posing questions around the production of knowledge through photography.

On episode 115, David discusses, among other things:

HIs formative years growing up in Derby

Why he messed up his exams as a teenager

Being politicised by the music press and the miners strike

Music photography and Management Today magazine being early photographic inspiration

His graduation project, Pictures from the real world

The Velvet Arena

How The Lisa and John Slideshow became a piece of verbatim theatre

Referenced:

Brian Griffin (Ep. 61)

Joel Meyorwitz

Bill Brandt

Ruth Orkin

Lewis Baltz

Paul Searight

Anna Fox

The Echo of Things by Christopher Wright

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

“When you’re there, there’s an ambivalence, an uncertainty. What carries you is a sort of youthful momentum and a sort of psychological need to make work in this set of circumstances, where you have an idea about what it is you want to do but you can’t say it until you see it. All those things that all people working on open ended project sexperience. The idea of a vision of it, trying to get something but you don’t know what it is...”

114 - Lisa Barnard

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 07:14:15 GMT

Lisa Barnard’s photographic practice is placed in the genre of documentary. Her work discusses real events, embracing complex and innovative visual strategies that utilise both traditional documentary techniques and more contemporary and conceptually rigorous forms of representation. Barnard connects her interest in aesthetics, current photographic debates around materiality, and the existing political climate. Of particular interest to her is global capitalism, the relationship between the military industrial complex, screen based new technologies and the psychological implication of conflict.

Lisa is an Associate Professor in photography and programme leader of the MA in Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales, where she also has PhD students and teaches on the BA in Documentary Photography course. She has published two monographs with GOST books: Chateau Despairand Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Gardenwhich was funded by the Albert Renger Patzsch Book Award, and nominated for the Prix Du Livre at Rencontres D’Arles in 2015.

Lisa’s latest book, recently published by Mack, is The Canary and the Hammer, an ambitious, complex and wide-ranging project detailing our reverence for gold and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Photographed across four years and four continents, the project was funded by the Prestige Grant from Getty Images in 2015.

On episode 114, Lisa discusses, among other things:

How teaching keeps her mentally on her toes

Growing up in the Thatcherite heartland of Sevenoaks, Kent

Her work from the San Diego Naval Medica Centre

Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden and how the title came about

Being an adventurist

Why the more conceptual the connection is, the more excited she gets

Her new project about gold, The Canary and the Hammer

Referenced:

Jacques Lacan

The Dollop podcast

Mark Power

Javier Rebas

Esther Teichmann

Sophy Rickett

Bettina von Zwehl

Clare Strand

Donovan Wylie

Gert Van Hesten

Skip Rizzo

Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism byFrederick Jameson

Eadweard Muybridge

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild Westby Rebecca Solnit

Martin Heidegger

Allan Sekula

Website | Instagra

113 - Ian Weldon

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 08:34:57 GMT

Ian Weldon is not a wedding photographer. But he does shoot weddings. He recently became the first photographer ever (probably) to have an exhibition of wedding photography in a ‘proper’ gallery, with a show at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, England. He also produced a book to coincide with the show, publishhed by RRB PhotoBooks and entitiled, of course, “I Am Not a Wedding Photographer.”

Partly as a result of the show, Ian has subsequently had a lot of press coverage in major outlets including the BBC, The Guardian, i-D.Vice, Creative Review, Huck Magazine and It’s Nice That. He has 18.2K folllowers on Instagram. Which is a lot.

Ian also hosts and produces the second best UK-based photography podcast: Outerfocus, in which he talks to photographers about their work and whatever else comes up. (My appearance, for what it’s worth, is here.)

On episode 113, Ian discusses, among other things:

His solo show at the Martin Parr Foundation
Being taken into care as a young child
His time in the army…
…and going a bit nuts on drink and drugs after leaving
How photography saved his life
Getting into shooting weddings
How his ethos evolved
His podcast, Outerfocus
Being offered a very personal commission from Martin Parr
Referenced:

Martin Parr (Ep 91.)
Helen Levitt
Bruce Gilden (Ep 84.)
Richard Avedon
Don McCullin

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Podcast

“Photographing granny on the dance floor with two pints of lager in her hand purposely is different to recognising something that you connect with and photograph. And that’s where there’ll always be a difference with what I do. I have no commercial interest at all with weddings... I’m not running a business with wedding photography... I just want people to get what I do and when people get that, then great, we’re on.”

112 - Mark Steinmetz

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 07:03:43 GMT

Mark Steinmetz is an American photographer who makes black and white photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit” and "in the midst of activity”. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Museum of Contemporary Photography, to name but a few. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been exhibited in too many major museums and art galleries to list. He has produced 15 photobooks, such as South Central (2007), The Players (2015), Fifteen Miles to K-Ville (2015) and the Angel City West trilogy.

Mark was born in New York City and raised in the Boston-area suburbs until he was 12 at which point he moved to the midwest. At age 21 he moved to New England to study photography at Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. He left that MFA program after one semester and in mid 1983, aged 22, moved to Los Angeles in search of the photographer Garry Winogrand, whom he befriended. In 1999 he moved to Athens, Georgia where he still lives, with his wife, photographer Irina Rozovsky, and their young daughter.

On episode 112, Mark discusses, among other things:

Delving into the archive

Angel City West

First darkroom in Iowa

Going to L.A. and meeting Winogrand

Earning a living

MOMA show

Bring drawn to The South and shooting there

Why he works in B&W

His aesthetic and why he still prints his own work

Meditation and avoiding distractions

Referenced:

Henry Wessel

Garry Winogrand

Robert Frank

Walker Evans

David M. Spear - The Neugents

Robert Adams

Lee Friedlander

Todd Pagageorge

André Kertesz

Website

“There’s this beautiful thing and it’s the main thing and it’s the important thing and sometimes perfectionism can just cripple that. You know, why is one picture alive and another dead? And often it’s just, who wants something perfect, you know? It doesn’t ring true really. So I do like some sloppiness but I try to be smart about it.”

111 - Les Rencontres d’Arles 2019 Special

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 07:43:52 GMT

Featured (or mentioned) on episode 111:

Jack Latham
Tristan Bejawn
Aletheia Casey
Keith Cullen
Gregory Barker
Maja Daniels
Hannah Watson
George Georgiou
Amanda Fordyce
Ash K Halliburton
Marina Paulenka

Referenced:

Libuse Jarcovjakova
Helen Levitt
Eve Arnold
Abigail Heyman
Susan Meiselas
David Spero
Andy Sewell
David Moore
Colin Thomas
John Myers
Daniel Meadows
Martin Parr
Ken Grant
Tom Wood
Christian Lutz

110 - Sohrab Hura

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 07:02:52 GMT

Sohrab Hura is an Indian photographer based in New Delhi, India. He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2014 and is currently an Associate member. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in London and in Kolkata, India.

Sohrab was born in West Bengal and attended India’s most highly regarded boys boarding school, The Doon School, in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. He has a masters degree in economics from the University of Delhi and began making photographs during college with a Nikon FM10 given to him by his father.

His self-published trilogy Sweet Life comprises the books Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition for Departure (2017) and Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018). The latter was shortlisted for Photobook of the Year in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. The trilogy focuses on Sohrab’s relationship with his mother, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1999, when he was 17 years old.

In 2011 the British Journal of Photography included Sohrab in its Ones to Watch list. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, included Hura's The Lost Head and the Bird exhibition in his "The top 10 photography exhibitions of 2017" describing it as “overwhelming, disorienting and utterly unforgettable.”

Sohrab’s fourth book, The Coast, was self-published in 2018 under his own Ugly Dog inprint and has been met with critical acclaim.

On episode 110, Sohrab discusses, among other things:

How misunderstanding the instructions for are grant led to something interesting

Feeling like he’s full of accidents and going with the flow

Seeking instablility

Photography as therapy in response to his mum’s illness - the Sweet Life trilogy

Boundaryless journeys, animals and birds

Staying in Magnum by the skin of his teeth

How he visualises his work as a tree

His latest book, The Coast

Piece on Magnum website
Discussion with Colin Pantall on Magnum Website

Website | Instagram (Ugly Dog books)

“For me, photography is just an excuse to insert myself into situations or spaces and to respond to those situations and spaces and to see what my relationship is with that.”

109 - Ed Panar

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 11:13:48 GMT

American photographer Ed Panar has a BA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He has published several photobooks including: In the Vicinity (Deadbeat Club, 2018), Animals That Saw Me Volume One and Volume Two (2011 and 2016, The Ice Plant), Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes (Spaces Corners & The Ice Plant, 2013), Salad Days (2012 Gottlund), Same Difference (2010, Gottlund), and Golden Palms (2007, J&L Books).

Ed “is a compiler of small moments, a celebrant of the everyday. Nothing dramatic happens in his photographs; nowhere exotic is shown. Rather, his prosaic images force us into a sustained encounter with the ordinariness of urban life, bringing together both meanings of the word pedestrian. In his ongoing body of work Out West, Panar reveals the fluidity of the interaction between the banal and the beautiful. (Panar also has a series, Back East, that produces a similar effect.) Some of the photos do indeed display the striking beauty of Western landscapes, but even this is contained within the bounds of ordinary life: Panar’s views are the kind you might have walking home from somewhere not far away, if you were to take that little detour that goes up the hill just a bit. We are a long way here from the majestic waterfalls and granite domes in Ansel Adams’s work. Panar’s photos seem to be saying that if we pay attention there is no need to venture far and wide, to scale the peaks or traverse the wilds — that something of value is just around the next corner.” (Aaron Rothman)

Ed’s photographs have been widely exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The New York Photography Festival, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Ed is co-founder - with his partner, photographer Melissa Catanese - of the project space and photography bookshop Spaces Corners, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he currently lives and works.

On episode 109, Ed discusses, among other things:

Learning from Todd Hido in San Francisco

Figuring out how to keep going no matter what

Walking Home - his first series, still not a book

Golden Palms

The importance of editing and how it starts while shooting

Animals That Saw Me Volume One and Volume Two

His interest in speculative realism

The importance of walking… and humour

In the Vicinity

HIs project space in Pittsburgh, Spaces Corners

Referenced:

Todd Hido

Chris McCall

Wolfgang Tillmans (Burg)

Nick Waplington

William Eggleston

Clint Woodside

Website | Instagram | Spaces Corners

“If I’ve figured anything out it’s how to kinda keep going no matter

108 - Irina Rozovsky

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:49:32 GMT

Irina Rozovsky was born in Moscow, Russia, and grew up in the USA, having moved there with her parents at the age of seven. Irina makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She has published two monographs, One to Nothing (2011) and Island in my Mind (2015). Her work is exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Harpers, and Vice. Irina lives and works in Athens, Georgia where she and her husband, photographer Mark Steinmetz, run the photography project space The Humid. Irina is represented by Claxton Projects.

On episode 108, Irina discusses, among other things:

Shooting with the iPhone

Early memories of Russia

Discovering photography in high school

Visiting Israel : One to Nothing

Serendipity: a “dance with chance”

Cuba: Island in my Mind

Her ongoing Balkan project Mountain Black Heart

The Humid, her photography project space.

Living in Georgia, USA, and Impressions of the south.

Referenced:

Cartier-Bresson

Roswell Angier

Rineke Dijkstra

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“I think it’s really good to be lost because then you teach yourself to - I dunno - like, crawl out somehow. And if you’re never lost then you’re kind of just always in this neutral grey town.”

107 - Simon Norfolk

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 07:03:13 GMT

Simon Norfolk (b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria) is a landscape photographer whose work over twenty years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word 'battlefield' in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world's worst war-zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or the test-launching of nuclear missiles. Time’s layeredness in the landscape is an ongoing fascination of his.

His work has been widely recognised: he has won The Discovery Prize at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2005; The Infinity Prize from The International Center of Photography in 2004; and he was winner of the European Publishing Award, 2002. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Prize, now known as the Deutsche Börse Prize, and in 2013 he won the Prix Pictet Commission. He has won multiple World Press Photo and Sony World Photography awards.

Simon has produced four monographs of his work including Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2002) which was published in five languages; For Most Of It I Have No Words (1998) about the landscapes of genocide; and Bleed (2005) about the war in Bosnia. His most recent is Burke + Norfolk; Photographs from the War in Afghanistan (2011).

He has work held in major collections such as The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Getty in Los Angeles as well as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wilson Centre for Photography and the Sir Elton John Collection. His work has been shown widely and internationally from Brighton to Ulaanbaatar and in 2011 his Burke + Norfolk work was one of the first ever photography solo shows at Tate Modern in London. He has been described by one critic as “the leading documentary photographer of our time. Passionate, intelligent and political; there is no one working in photography that has his vision or his clarity.”

On episode 107, Simon discusses, among other things:

Why being married to a surgeon makes photography feel ‘really rather trivial’

Instagram and some of its young stars

Not wanting to do “any shite”

Climate change and his ‘pyrograph’ project on Mount Kenya

Why he went to Afghanistan in 2001

Why his work is ‘intensely English’

Why he left Oxford after his first year

How he made his famous balloon seller picture

Not seeing a future for himself in photography

Referenced:

Joey L

Thomas Heaton

Klaus Thymann (Project Pressure)

John Wyatt Clarke

Paul Lowe

Antonio Olmos

Ben Lowy

Claude Lorrain

Nicolas Poussin

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“There is a huge photography thing out there. It’s just that this rather narrow band of snobby, up its arse art photog

106 - Andrea Modica

Wed, 29 May 2019 07:33:37 GMT

Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches as professor of photography at Drexel University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of a Knight Award. Andrea is perhaps best known for her portrait photography and for her use of black and white film, shot on an 8"x10" view camera and printed using the platinum-palladium process.

Her books include Treadwell (Chronicle), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Barbara (Nazraeli), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions) and most recently As We Wait (L’Artiere), now in its second edition and more recently a collection of portraits of ‘Mummer Wenches’, titled January 1 (L’Artiere). Her latest book, featuring work shot over a 30 year period, is Lentini (KGP) and her upcoming is a book of photographs made at a horse clinic in Italy, titled Clinica Equina Bagnarola (Tis Books).

Andrea’s photographs have been featured in such prominent publications as the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Newsweek, she has had solo exhibitions at numerous prestigious museums and her photographs are part of the permanent collections of several of them.

On episode 106, Andrea discusses, among other things:

The act sometimes being more important than the result
How she earnt money shooting real estate
Not being deterred by gender bias
Getting ‘her hands in the clay’ with the 8x10 camera
Her book, Treadwell
Recent book project, Lentini
Instagram
Her current horse hospital project: Clinica Equina Bagnarola

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“Using the big camera, processing film, washing it, waiting for it to dry, making proof prints, looking at those, deciding - which sometimes take quite a while - if anything is worthy of printing further, and then deciding if it’s worth keeping. That’s when my hands are really in the clay...”

105 - Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb

Wed, 15 May 2019 10:34:42 GMT

Rebecca Norris Webb was originally a journalist and a poet before falling in love with photography and transitioning to a career that has since incorporated all of those disciplines. Rebecca has produced numerous books and exhibitions, most notably her monograph, My Dakota — an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly — with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2015), among other venues.

Alex Webb is famous for his vibrant, complex colour street photography, especially that from Haiti, Cuba and Mexico, though he has more recently begun shooting on his home soil in the USA. Alex has produced sixteen photo books, won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979.

Together, as well as being husband and wife, Alex and Rebecca have shared an abiding creative partnership, collaborating on numerous book projects including Violet Isle, their work form Cuba, Memory City and Slant Rhymes . Their latest collaboration, Brooklyn: The City Within, is a book project about the New York borough which has been their home for many years, and that will be published by aperture entitled in September of 2019. Alex and Rebecca were recently recipients of an NEA grant.

On episode 105, Rebecca and Alex discuss, among other things:

Their first collaboration: Violet Isle
Their respective strengths
Memory City
Slant Rhymes
Their forthcoming book Brooklyn: The City Within
Making book dummies
Advice on collaborating
Future projects individual and together
Referenced:

David Chickey
Teju Cole
John Ashbery
Ilya Kaminsky
Marie Howe
Italo Calvino

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“I think we both realised that we were each others biggest fans, but because we were that we were also very insightful critcs and it was a sense that it would be better if we told each other what we though were the weaknesses of a project before the project went out into the world. And even though that sometimes caused tensions in the marriage, we realised that overall oit was worth going through that creatively...”
— Rebecca Norris Webb

104 - Chico Review 2019 Special

Wed, 01 May 2019 13:51:12 GMT

A special report from this year’s annual Chico portfolio review in Montana, USA.

Contributors on episode 104 include:

Jesse Lenz

Alfonso Fonseca

Jeffrey Robins

Tarrah Krajnak

Lindsay Metivier

Jon Levitt

Andrea Modica

Nicole Enerson

Pradip Malde

Marcus Chormicle

Jake Knapp

Austin Kral

Cécile poimboeuf-koizumi

Ruth Lauer-Manenti

Virginia Wilcox

Clint Woodside

Jeffrey Stockbridge

Phil Jung

Mark Steinmetz

Todd Seelie

Tim Carpenter

“It isn’t like you’ve had a quick three hour portfolio review and then you leave, like speed dating. You’ve spent some life with somebody. There’s a bond.”
— Jesse Lenz

103 - Todd Hido

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 07:12:33 GMT

Todd Hido is an American photographer born in Ohio and who for many years has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received a BFA from Tufts University in Massachusetts, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of Art in San Francisco. Todd’s images have featured in many publications, have been exhibited widely and are included in various prestigious public and private collections, most notably, Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco which holds the archive of all his published works. He has over a dozen published books to his name, including a mid-career survey entitled Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs published in 2016 by Aperture, and his most recent monograph is Bright Black World, which was released by Nazraeli Press in 2018 and is already sold out.

In episode 103, Todd discusses, among other things:

Discovering photography at school as a C and D student

BMX as his first subject matter

How the houses at night series began as an ‘establishing shot’

Why he values his education as a commercial photographer

His mentor, Larry Sultan

The joy of being lost in the fog

The influence of Jim Dow

Collaborating with his female subjects

His most recent book Bright Black World

Referenced:

Robert Frank

Larry Sultan

Raymond Carver

[Robert Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer)

Sally Mann

Tina Barney

Jim Dow

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“The thing that I always say about meaning and art is that the meaning of the image resides in the viewer. And I think that’s a really true thing. Like in music, what’s the meaning of a song? It means a thousand different things to a thousand different people. And there’s an intention of the artist, but that’s not always what’s the most important thing.”

Episode sponsored by PicDrop, The Charcoal Book Club and Findr.

102 - Hannah Starkey

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 07:26:21 GMT

Quietly contemplative yet intensely evocative, Hannah Starkey's photographs explore the physical and psychological connections between the individual and her everyday urban surroundings. Since the beginning of her career, the artist has worked predominantly with women as her subjects, collaborating closely with actresses as well as anonymous acquaintances she meets on-site to develop intricately textured scenes. Stark architectural backdrops and strong associations of color and imagery heighten the sensation of her compositions on both a formal and associative level, triggering personal interpretations and a deeper mediation on the experience of the visual world at large.

Born in Belfast in 1971, Hannah currently lives and works in London. She received a B.A. in Photography and Film from Napier University in Edinburgh in 1995 and an M.A. in Photography from Royal College of Art in London in 1997. She has received numerous awards and honors throughout her career, which include the Vogue Condé Nast Award (1997), the 3rd International Tokyo Photo Biennale’s Award for Excellence (1999), and the St. James Group Ltd Photography Prize (2002).

In 2000, she presented her first major solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Other important solo presentations include Twenty-Nine Pictures at the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, UK (2011) and Church of Light Altarpiece, a site-specific commission for St. Catherine’s Church in Frankfurt (2010). Her work has also been exhibited as part of important group presentations at Tate Liverpool, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among other museums worldwide.

Hannah’s photographs are in the collections of the Tate in London, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

In episode 102, Hannah discusses, among other things:

The influence of cinema

Not wanting to be highbrow

Using a breadth of disciplines technique and languages

Breaking down the barriers to different types of photography

How her process usually works

The commodification of women in advertising photography

The influence of her mother and her upringing during The Troubles

Some of her hopes for her own daughters

Referenced:

Hackney Flashers

Gallery/Dealer

“I think if I can bring images out into the world that depict this energy, and - empowerment’s a tricky word but - this power that’s coming from this next generation, in one image, then that’s kinda my drive, that’s my motivation.”

101 - Poulomi Basu

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 12:58:55 GMT

Poulomi Basu is a storyteller, artist and activist. Her name sounds like ‘follow me’ with a ‘P’.

She was raised by her mother in Calcutta, India and found early inspiration in the city’s rich cinematic history. After her father’s sudden death when Poulomi was 17, her mother told her to leave home as soon as her studies were complete so that she may follow her dreams and live a life of breadth and choices that was denied to her.

Since then, Poulomi prefers the path less trodden. She has slept in the wilderness under a cloudless sky staring at a million stars in search of a guerrilla army whose story strikes right at the very heart of modern India’s global ambitions, through to divided families eking out an Alaskan existence on the last rocky outpost of American soil.

Time and again, she has found herself amongst ordinary people who quietly challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of the world in which they live: rural women in armed conflict, a mother's pain for a son lost to ISIS, to the wonder of a near blind child reaching for the light.

Poulomi is forever in awe of the resilience shown by those in extraordinary circumstance, by those who are bent but not broken. Her work has become known for documenting the role of women in isolated communities and conflict zones and more generally for advocating for the rights of women.

Poulomi was featured alongside Hilary Clinton as one of the one of the 'Amazing women from around the world giving their best advice' by Refinery29. She was part of the VII Mentor Program. She is based between New Delhi, India and London, UK. She has covered issues across Asia, Europe and America. She is co-founder and director of Just Another Photo Festival, a festival that democratizes photography by taking photography to the people and forging new audiences.

In episode 101, Poulomi discusses, among other things:

The severe anxiety disorder that struck her out of the blue.

Her sometimes violent upbringing in a patriachal home.

The influence of the cinema of Satyajit Ray and the French new wave.

Blood Speaks - the ritual of chaupadi.

Using Virtual Reality as part of her storytelling practice.

The curious tale of how she won the foto evidence book award only to have it withdrawn.

Her forthcoming book project Centralia .

Referenced:

Satyajit Ray

Lee Friedlander

[Raghubir Sing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghubir_Singh_(photographer)

Raghu Rai

Souvid Datta

David Bowie

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Bloodspeaks.org

“We should be bold and make experimental work. Without experimenting you can’t go to the next level, if you don’t take risks you’ll never make great work. And I firmly believe that.”

100 - Ben Smith

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 08:30:00 GMT

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 playe

099 - Zed Nelson

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 08:20:00 GMT

Zed Nelson lives in London, where he grew up, and his work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Having gained recognition and major awards as a documentary photographer working in some of the most troubled areas of the world, Zed has increasingly turned his focus to Western society, adopting an increasingly conceptual approach to reflect on contemporary social issues.

Gun Nation, a disturbing reflection on America’s deadly love affair with the gun, was Zed’s seminal first book. The project has been awarded five major international photography prizes and is regarded by many as the definitive body of work on the subject.

Love Me, Zed’s more recently published second book, reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty. The project explores how a new form of globalization is taking place, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand. The project spans five years, and involved photography in 18 countries across five continents. Love Me was nominated for the 2011 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, short-listed for the Leica European Publishers Award for Photography, and received First Prize in the 2010 Pictures of the Year International awards. Previous awards include the Visa d’Or, France; first prize in World Press Photo Competition; and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, USA.

Zed’s work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, the ICA and the National Portrait Gallery, and is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum and he has had solo shows in London, Stockholm and New York.

In episode 099, Zed discusses, among other things:

Why he’s keeping shtum about his current project

Gun Nation

Love Me

Getting the balance right

In This Land, his journey to Israel and Palestine and why plans for a book went pear-shaped

A Portrait of Hackney

The Family

Shooting video

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“I tried, and have continued to try, to find a way that photography produces enough money to live and do projects and then I’ve always just used the money for personal work... long-term projects I believe in and want to do.”

098 - Matthew Finn

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 08:05:00 GMT

Matthew Finn has a Degree in Photography from Derby University and an MA in Photographic Studies from Westminster University.

He is best known for his long term projects, undetaken over a period of nearly 30 years, focussing both on his mother, Jean, and his uncle, Jean’s brother, Des.

A book of the former project entitled Mother was published by Dewi Lewis in 2017 and the work has been exhibited at various major galleries including Jerwood Space, London, the Impressions Gallery Bradford and The Open Eye gallery Liverpool. The project won him the Jerwood/ Photoworks Awards in 2015.

Matthews latest book, due to be published by Stanley Barker later this year, is entitled School of Art and features portraits of his students taken while he was a teacher during the mid to late 90’s.

In episode 098, Matthew discusses, among other things:

Discovering the astonishing truth about his father on the eve of his funeral

How his mum and uncle became his first subjects

Love and guilt

His School of Art work and why it wouldn’t be possible now

Referenced:

John Blakemore

Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Sally Mann’s Immediate Family

Paul Graham

Bill Brandt

Daniel Meadows

Alec Soth

Elinor Carucci

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“I must be the only person who’s never ever undertaken a commercial job and I’ve been making photographs for over 30 years!”

097 - Chris Dorley-Brown

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 09:53:00 GMT

Chris Dorley Brown, set up his own photographic practice in 1984 concentrating on documenting East London. In a series of residencies and commissions focussing on social housing, workplaces, hospitals and architecture, he has established a substantial archive of images that are re-purposed and re-contextualised for distribution via web, film, exhibition and publication. Project partners have included the BBC, Museum of London, Homerton Hospital, the Wellcome Collection and various London Borough archives. He often works with re-energising existing archival material as part of creating new works. Recent publications include photo books The Longest Way Round (Overlapse, 2015), Drivers In The 1980s (Hoxton Mini-Press, 2015), The Corners (Hoxton Mini-Press, 2018) and The East End in Colour: The Photography of David Granick (Hoxton Mini-Press, 2018). He lives and works in East London and is represented by the Robert Koch gallery in San Francisco, USA.

In episode 097, Chris discusses, among other things:

The transition from the 60s to the 70s

Hackney

His role as an archivist

His composite technique, as seen in The Corners

Being physically attacked by Henri Cartier Bresson

Not feeling like a pro

Discovering the work of David Granick for The East End In Colour

Nostalgia

Drivers In The 1980s

His parents’ stories and the book The Longest Way Round

Referenced:

Ezra Stoller

Julius Shulman

Mike Seaborne

Peter Funch

Stephen Shore

Paul Graham

Bill Brandt

Diane Arbus

Tish Murtha

JG Ballard

Miles Davis

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“Photography is now, what?, 180 years old. It’s still young, as a thing. It’s still very much in its infancy. We’re just coming to understand what it is.”

096 - Lynsey Addario

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 09:39:00 GMT

Lynsey Addario is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author who regularly works for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. Lynsey began photographing professionally for the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina in 1996 with no previous photographic training. In the late 1990s, she began freelancing in New York City for Associated Press, where she worked consistently for three years before moving to New Delhi, India, to cover South Asia for the Chrstian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and Houston Chronicle. In 2000, Lynsey first travelled to Afghanistan to document the life and oppression of women living under the Taliban, and made three separate trips to the country under Taliban rule before September 11, 2001.

Over the past 15 years, Lynsey has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. In 2015 she released a New York Times best-selling memoir, It's What I Do, which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist and which was quickly optioned by Warner Bros. studios and slated to be a Steven Speilberg production starring jennifer lawrence but has now morphed into a directed by Ridley Scott production starring Scarlett Johansson.

Lynsey has been the recipient of numerous international awards throughout her career, and in 2015, American Photo Magazine named Lynsey one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, writing that “Addario changed the way we saw the world’s conflicts.” In 2009, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, for which she received a professional stipend from 2010 to 2015. She was part of the New York Times team to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her photographs in ‘Talibanistan,’ published in the New York Times Magazine. In November 2015, she was awarded the Excellence in International Reporting Award from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, DC, a Gaudium award from The Breukelein Institute in New York, and the el Mundo Journalism award in Barcelona, Spain. In 2016, Lynsey was part of the New York Times team nominated for an Emmy Award for her collaboration in the The Displaced series for the New York Times Magazine, a reportage documenting the lives of three children displaced from war in Syria, Ukraine, and South Sudan. She was the recipient of the Overseas Press Club's Oliver Rebbot award for 'Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad in Magazines and Books,' for her series Veiled Rebellion, an intimate look at the lives of Afghan Women.

Her new photobook Of Love And War, which represents a career retrospective to-date, was recently published by Penguin Random House.

In episode 096, Lynsey discusses, among other things:

The situation in Yemen

News from Hollywood on the forthcoming movie of her memoir It's What I Do

Writing the memoir and why she didn’t worry about her writing skills

The new photobook Of Love And War and how she went about editing from a million photos

Her upbringing as the youngest of four girls in a ‘loud, crazy, eccentric’ Italian-American family

Her tendency for self-criticism

Madonna, Salgado, Bebeto Matthews and early career inflection points

India, Afghanistan, Pakistan an

095 - The Year In Review 2018

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 15:56:00 GMT

Featuring:

Christopher Anderson

Paul Lowe

Tom Hunter

Éanna de Fréine

Matt Black

Rafal Milach

Nichole Sobecki

Anush Babajanyan

Rhiannon Adam

Maggie Steber

Vanessa Winship

Ed Kashi

Bruce Gilden

John Stanmeyer

Ron Haviv

Jillian Edelstein

Daniel Schwartz

Alixandra Fazzina

Donald Weber

Martin Parr

Léonie Hampton

Martin Usborne

Chris Killip

094 - Chris Killip

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 08:20:00 GMT

Born in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip left school at sixteen and joined the isle’s only four star hotel as a trainee manager. In June 1964 he realised that a future in hotel management was not on the cards and instead decided to pursue photography full time. He duly became a beach photographer in order to earn enough money to leave the Isle of Man.

In October 1964 Chris was hired as the third assistant to the leading London advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He then worked as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966-69. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he had an epiphany: photography was something that could be pursued for its own sake. Chris decided to return to the Isle of Man to make his own work where he made ends meet by working in his father's pub at night, returning to London on occasion to print his work.

On a return visit to the USA in 1971, Lee Witkin, the New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of the Isle of Man work, paying for it in advance so that Chris could continue to photograph. In 1972 he received a commission from The Arts Council of Great Britain to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds for the exhibition Two Views - Two Cities. In 1975, he moved to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a two year fellowship as the Northern Arts Photography Fellow. He was a founding member, exhibition curator and advisor of Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as its director, from 1977-9.

He continued to live in Newcastle and photographed throughout the North East of England, and from 1980-85 made occasional cover portraits for The London Review of Books. In 1989 he was commissioned by Pirelli UK to photograph the workforce at their tyre factory in Burton-on-Trent. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award and in 1991 was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continues to live in the USA.

His work is featured in the permanent collections of numerous major institutions worldwide and his seminal photobook In Flagrante is included in volume II of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s influential three part series The Photobook: A History.

In episode 094, Chris discusses, among other things:

Living in the ‘ivory tower’ of Harvard University

The four zines he produced with Pony Ltd - The Station, The Last Ships, Skinningrove and Portraits.

How persistence and a chance encounter in a pub opened the door to his Seacoal project

The complexities of making a portrait

Making In Flagrante and the differences in the recent version

How he narrowly avoided a career in hotel management

Assisting Adrian Flowers in London during the swinging sixties

Why he’s never had the desire to photograph in America

Referenced:

Koudelka

Paul Strand

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Mark Neville

Henri Cartier Bresson

David Bailey

Brian Duffy

Terence Donavon

Art Tatum

093 - Martin Usborne

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 08:18:00 GMT

Martin Usborne studied philosophy and psychology and then began a career as a 3D animator before eventually turning to photography. HIs key interest is in man’s relationship to other animals. Although his imagery is sometimes dark – capturing the way in which we silence, control or distance ourselves from other animals – his pictures almost always strive for a subtle humour. He has produced several books including two which feature dogs: The Silence of Dogs in Cars and Where Hunting Dogs Rest.

As well as being a successful commercial and editorial photographer Martin runs the independent photo book publisher Hoxton Mini Press, with his wife, Ann. They began at the end of 2013 after Martin self-published his own photo book, I’ve Lived in East London for 86 1/2 Years, setting out to bring accessible, beautifully produced but affordable photo books about east London to a wide, non-specialist audience. Since then they have expanded that remit to other areas and topics and have turned Hoxton Mini Press into a thriving and distinctive inprint with almost fifty books to its name.

In episode 093, Martin discusses, among other things:

An email he got from a photographer who shall remain nameless

His feelings about Hoxton Mini Press on the eve of its 5th birthday

The economics of book publishing

The Hoxton Mini Press brand and what seems to sell

I’ve Lived in East London for 86 1/2 Years

The Silence of Dogs in Cars

Where Hunting Dogs Rest

Ideas for personal projects

Where are photo books going and the future for Hoxton Mini Press

Referenced:

Jenny Lewis

Nick Turpin

Zed Nelson

Annie Leibowitz

Stephen Shore

Martin Parr

Dewi Lewis

Andy Sewell

Chris Dorley-Brown

Spencer Murphy

Dougie Wallace

Martin: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Hoxton Mini Press: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“There’s an avoidance there. I love photography and being a photographer but there is a certain amount of fear in doing your own thing. And it’s sometimes easier to produce other people’s work. And to go out and to do your own project and it not be good is quite scary...”

EPISODE SPONSORED BY: THE MARTIN PARR FOUNDATION AND THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB

092 - Léonie Hampton

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 08:10:00 GMT

Léonie Hampton was born in London in 1978 and began to photograph at the age of seven with a pink and purple point-and-push Le Clic camera. After graduating in Art History at University College London and SOAS in 2000, she continued her studies in Photography at the London College of Communication.

Since then she has exhibited in solo and group shows in the U.K. France, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Vienna, Italy and Canada. Successive photo-based projects have been funded by Wellcome Trust and the British Council and her 16-part photo Installation was purchased for the permanent collection of the MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie - Ville de Paris) in 2008. In 2011, her award-winning 184-page book In The Shadow Of Things was published by Contrasto (Italy).

Léonie is a part-time teacher for MA Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. She co-founded and runs Still/Moving, a not-for-profit organisation hosting film and photography workshops and seminars. She lives and works in Devon, United Kingdom.

In episode 092, Leonie discusses, among other things:

Starting photography at 7 years old!

Discovering the darkroom at boarding school

Assisting Tom Stoddart

Labours of Hercules

In The Shadow Of Things

Channeling obsessive characteristics into creativity

Collection In Person - her ‘albatros project’

Mend for the Rome Commission

Referenced:

Anders Petersen

Sarah Moon

Nan Goldin

Ray’s A Laugh

Antoine D’agata

Stuart Smith

Paul Graham

Tim Etchells

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“I work in the way of discovering through practice; but to find something I want to say. I don’t want to leave it in the land of unknown. I look for treasure within that experience and then I’m, like, ‘there it is!’ and I take that and I work with that.”

EPISODE SPONSORED BY: THE MARTIN PARR FOUNDATION AND THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB

091 - Martin Parr

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 08:13:00 GMT

The man who the Daily Telegraph declared to be, “arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer” had a suburban childhood in the provincial county of Surrey, England, where his budding interest in the medium of photography was encouraged by his grandfather George Parr, himself a keen amateur photographer.

Martin went on to study photography at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 70s and since that time has worked on many, many photographic projects, publishing over 100 books of his own work and editing another 30. He has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and his input to photographic culture within the UK and abroad.

In 1994 Martin became a full member of Magnum Photos, scraping in by a single vote, in the face of strong opposition to his inclusion from some of the old guard, including Philip Jones Griffiths and Henri Cartier Bresson himself. He has since become an important and influential Magnum Member where he served as President between 2013 and 2017.

Martin has also developed an interest in filmmaking, and has started to use his photography within different genres, such as fashion and advertising. In 2002 the Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum initiated a large retrospective of Martin’s work and this exhibition toured Europe for the next 5 years.

Martin was Professor of Photography at The University of Wales Newport campus from 2004 to 2012 and Guest Artistic Director for the Arles photo festival in 2004. In 2006 he was awarded the Erich Salomon Prize and the resulting Assorted Cocktail show opened at Photokina and in 2008 was guest curator at New York Photo Festival.

Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst, Munich, in 2008. The show exhibited Martin’s own collection of objects, postcards, photography prints by both British and International photographers, photo books and a new project from Parr entitled Luxury. The exhibition toured Europe for the following 2 years.

At PhotoEspana in 2008, Martin won the Baume et Mercier Award in recognition of his professional career and contributions to contemporary photography. He is co-author with Gerry Badger of the exhuastive three volume series The Photobook: A History. In March 2016 Strange and Familiar, curated by Parr, opened at the Barbican, London. The show examines how international photographers from 1930s onwards have photographed in the UK.

Martin was awarded the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography in April 2017. In Autumn 2017 the Martin Parr Foundation - which is a gallery and archive dedicated to supporting and preserving the photographic legacy of not only Martin himself but also of photographers who made, and continue to make, important work focused on the British Isles - opened in Bristol.

Martin is currently working on an exhibition for the National Portrait Gallery which opens in March 2019.

In episode 091, Martin discusses, among other things:

The Foundation
The UK’s attitude towards photography
How his suburban childhood influenced his photography
Tony Ray Jones
Developing his distinctive colour style
The Last Resort
Being described as ‘an alien’ by Heni Cartier Bresson
Passing on 12,000 photobooks to Tate Modern
The health and future of Magnum Photos

Referenced:

Roger Mayne
David Hoffman
Hans Bellmer

090 - Donald Weber

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 06:15:00 GMT

Prior to photography, Donald Weber originally trained as an architect and worked with Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is a photographer whose work explores the infrastructures of power in conjunction with the shadow states of globalised violence: societal, cultural, and economic.

Donald is the author of four books. His first, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, won the Photo Lucida Book Prize and asked a simple question: what is daily life actually like, in a post-atomic world? Interrogations, about post-Soviet authority in Ukraine and Russia, has gone on to much acclaim; it was selected to be included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s seminal The Photobook: A History, Volume III. Barricade: The EuroMaidan Revolt, is about the smoking language of revolution, made in collaboration with Ukrainian photographer Arthur Bondar. His latest, War Sand, tells the story of D-Day, from myth to micron.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Duke and Duchess of York Prize, two World Press Photo awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Prize.

His diverse photography projects have been exhibited as installations, exhibitions and screenings at festivals and galleries worldwide including the United Nations, Museum of the Army at Les Invalides in Paris, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. Donald is noted for his teaching, public presentations and workshops. He has three times been named ‘master’ for World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass and chaired the Documentary category of the World Press Photo Awards in 2015.

He is represented by Circuit Gallery in Toronto and is on the faculty of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, The Netherlands in the Fine Art and Photography departments.

In episode 090, Donald discusses, among other things:

The PhD he just started

Being told by a teacher that he sucked at photography

Getting a job with Rem Koolhaas

Moving to Ukraine and working on Chernobyl book

Interrogations

War Sand

The contributiuon of book editor Teun van der Heijden

Whether photobooks need a ‘reset’.

Photojournalism being at a point of transition

Empathy and insecurity

Referenced:

Eyal Weizman

Paul Fusco

Shahidal Allam

Larry Frolick

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“I was thinking of going into a photojournalism programme and I had two options. So I asked my teacher, ‘should I go here or here?’ And he looked at me with profound disgust and said ‘Neither. Y

089 - Alixandra Fazzina

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Alixandra Fazzina, whose photography focuses on under-reported conflicts and the often overlooked humanitarian consequences of war, has an uncanny ability to gain access to and work in the most challenging circumstances imaginable and is recognised for her compassionate and empathetic approach.

She was born in East London, where she is now based, but spent much of her childhood in the Netherlands because of her father's work. She studied fine art at the University of Bristol, and in 1995, the day after she finished her course, she went to Bosnia with the British armed forces as an official war artist and it was there that she developed her interest in photography.

Since then, she has worked independently as a photojournalist throughout Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Her stories have been widely published in the British and international press and her photographs exhibited worldwide.

In 2008, after working on assignment in Afghanistan, she moved to Pakistan, where she lived for six years. During that time, over a two year period, she worked to chronicle the exodus of migrants and refugees from Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden to the Arabian Peninsula. The resulting book A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia was published by Trolley Books in 2010. A Million Shillings, the title of which comes from the fare paid by refugees to the traffickers (about 50 pounds sterling), was shortlisted for the Pictures of the Year International Best Photography Book of the Year Award. A selection of the works has been shortlisted for the Prix Pictet global award in photography and sustainability. In 2008 she was the recipient of the Vic Odden Award from the British Royal Photographic Society for her work in Somalia, and was a finalist in the CARE Award for Humanitarian Reportage and the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography.

In 2010 Alixandra won the highly prestigious UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award for her striking coverage of the devastating human consequences of war and her fearless and tireless dedication to humanitarian photography throughout her career. Having spent six years documenting the effects of conflict and displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she produced the long-term project The Flowers of Afghanistan, documenting the stories of Afghan children seeking refuge in Europe. The photographic investigation looks into the causes and effects of the increasing number of Afghan minors making the hazardous overland journey to apply for asylum in EU member states.

In addition to her photography and writing, Alixandra has worked as researcher and producer for broadcast media and is regular contributor for radio and she regularly teaches masterclasses and workshops around the world for organisations such as World Press Photo, Reporters Without Borders and The Royal Photographic Society. She lectures in art, photography and media at photography and literature festivals and at on under and post graduate programmes at universities and is a member of the NOOR collective.

In episode 089, Alixandra discusses, among other things:

How her fine art background is relevant to photography

Growing up a tomboy with an interest in conflict

Learning the ropes in Bosnia as an official war artist

How as photographers we sometimes don’t really look properly

Being held captive in Liberia

Her knack for gaining access

People trafficking across the Gulf of Aden and her book A Million Shillings

Editing and the importance of the text

Yemen, Djibouti and the follow up project

Website (NOOR)<

088 - Daniel Schwartz

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 07:21:00 GMT

Daniel Schwartz concentrates on book projects with exhibitions, based on extensive travels, photographic essays, and reportages covering the Eastern Hemisphere from Iran to East Timor and from Turkmenistan to Bangladesh. Daniel’s art, as he puts it, is in the history of places and his journalism rather than being a reaction to events, builds on memory. His method is perhaps best expressed in Travelling through the Eye of History (published, in 2009, like all his books, by Thames & Hudson), a pre- and post-9/11 observation covering Central Asia including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir.

In 1987 to 1988, during a forbidden journey, Daniel became the first foreigner and photographer to travel along all sections of the Great Wall of China.

His documentation of the habitats of South and Southeast Asia's deltas, endangered by the consequences of climate change, were an early photojournalistic investigation into that subject, celebrated by the Financial Times as a visual j’accuse and made him twice a finalist of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. He continues to work on the subject of climate change for While the Fires Burn: A Glacier Odyssey, his exploration of the recession of the world’s glaciers.

In episode 088, Daniel discusses, among other things:

Early education

Using assignments to pursue personal projects

Going to Greece

China and The Great Wall

The Deltas and climate change

His relationship with publisher Thames & Hudson

His work on documenting glaciers in While The Fires Burn

The documentary about his life and work, Beyond The Obvious

His travels in central Asia, the history of that region and the five republics

The importance to him of writing

The current situation in Yemen

His income pie chart

Joining VII Photos

Referenced:

Guy Bourdin

John Thompson

Sophie Calle

Francis Fukuyama

Website

“We need to listen. First of all we need to go, see for ourself, and
then obviously we meet people and we have to listen to them. We should
forget about our pre-concepts which we carry. We inform ourselves at
home and then we forget what we have read, and we go there. And this
will eventually change or modify the concepts we have, and we need to
listen to what people have to say to us and to find a way of building
their information into the way we see things.”

087 - Jillian Edelstein

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 06:03:00 GMT

Jillian Edelstein grew up in Cape Town, South Africa and began her photographic career learning the ropes by assisting before becoming a newspaper press photographer in Johannesburg. After which she moved to London to attended the London College of Printing's photojournalism course. It was while she was still studying that she began getting commissions from The Sunday Times.

Her portraits have appeared internationally in just about every major publication you can name, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The FT Weekend Magazine, Vanity Fair, Interview, Vogue, Port, The Guardian Weekend, The Sunday Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Forbes, GQ and Esquire and her photographs have been exhibited internationally including in the National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers' Gallery, The Royal Academy, OXO Gallery in London, Sothebys, and Arles, among others.

Jillian has received several awards including the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year Award, the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, and the John Kobal Book Award. Her work has been included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Award twice, included in the World Press Awards twice and she was a finalist in the 2017 LensCulture Portrait Awards.

Jillian also judged the World Press Awards in 2014, and the Taylor Wessing Awards in 2010.

Between 1996 and 2002 she returned to South Africa frequently to document the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her resulting award winning book Truth and Lies, shot on large format, was published by Granta, the New Press and Mail and The Guardian in 2002.

She is currently working on several photographic projects and a documentary film about the screenwriter Norman Wexler.

In episode 087, Jillian discusses, among other things:

The documentary she is making about Hollywood screenwriter Norman Wexler

Being driven and dogged

Here and There, her unpublished book project about her Aunt Minna

Apartheid South Africa

Coming to London, The Sunday Times and the Wapping dispute

Portrait work and building a folio

Having to rescue a shoot with Spike Lee

Her book on the The Truth and Reconcilliation Commission

Revisiting her Affinities project

Advice she’d give her 20 and 40 year old selves

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“Sometimes I’m like a rottweiler... It is that thing about being darned perisistant. You have to have the belief, you have to have the commitment, you have to have the perseverance and you have to at all costs believe that these things will prevail and will out. And there’s a lot of pushing to make them happen. I don’t want to make it sound tougher than it already is but it is true, I don’t think it’s an easy game...”

086 - Ron Haviv

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 07:17:00 GMT

Ron Haviv is an Emmy nominated, award-winning photojournalist and co-founder of the photo agency VII, dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe.

In the last three decades, Ron has covered more than twenty-five conflicts and worked in over one hundred countries. He has published three critically acclaimed photo books. His first, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering,” by Newsweek. His other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul, Haiti: 12 January 2010 and his latest book, The Lost Rolls.

Ron has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague and President George H. W. Bush cited his chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention.

His film work has appeared on PBS’s Need to Know and Frontline as well as NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight. He has directed short films for ESPN, People Magazine, Doctors Without Borders, Asia Society and American Photography.

Ron has helped create multi-platform projects for numerous NGO's and various other organisations and his commercial clients include Ad Council, American Express, BAE, Canon USA, ESPN, IBM and Volkswagen.

In episode 086, Ron discusses, among other things:

Early mistakes

New opportunities for sharing work

The picture taken in Panama that kick-started his career

Being a human being first and a photographer second

Fear and the myth of the ‘adrenaline addicted’ war photographer

Anger at injustice

Biography of a Photograph - film

Recent ethical transgressions

The controversy over one of his photographs being used by an arms company to advertise bombs

The story behind his photograph of a dying Afghan commander (above)

The Lost Rolls project and the relationship between photography and memory

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Also, please sign this petition to support the release of Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam and share his cause on social media using #FreeShahidulAlam

“I might and should be and am emotional while photographing. I cannot let the emotion overcome me at that point. The emotion overcomes me once the job is over; once I am back in a safe place, then I can break down and cry and process what I’ve just witnessed. But it is incredibly important to remain focussed while doing the job, while photographing and documenting. but at the same time I cannot be a robot. I mean it would be very easy to completely turn off all emotions, but my opinion is that once a photographer does that it comes across in the photography. So I have to feel somet

085 - John Stanmeyer

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 10:34:00 GMT

John Stanmeyer is an award winning photojournalist, Emmy nominated filmmaker and field recordist who for over 20 years has worked in nearly 100 countries, documenting the social and political issues that define our times.

For ten years, between 1998 and 2008, John was a contract photographer for Time magazine, during which time he produced 18 covers for them and photographed hundreds of stories, including the war in Afghanistan, the fight for independence in East Timor, the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, and other significant world news events. Since 2004 he has worked almost exclusively for National Geographic magazine, producing over 15 stories, including 10 covers.

John is now an Emeritus member of the VII Photo agency which he co-founded in his living room in 2001 with six other of the world’s leading photojournalists. John is the recipient of numerous honors, including the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal, POYi Magazine Photographer of the Year, and numerous World Press Photo, Picture of the Year and NPPA awards. In 2008, his National Geographic cover story on global malaria received the National Magazine Award. In 2012 he was nominated for an Emmy with the documentary film series, Starved for Attention, and in 2014 was the recipient of the World Press Photo award for his photograph taken in Djibouti and titled Signal (above).

John has published a number of books includingIsland of the Spirits, a journalistic/anthropological look at Balinese culture documented during the five years he lived on the island.

John now lives on a farm in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with this wife, three children and two dogs. When not on the road he can be found at his gallery and coffeehouse which he opened in 2013, combining photography and education around his passion for great coffee, wrapping the two around ethically procured, human rights-based direct trade with the social issues represented in his photographs.

In episode 085, John discusses, among other things:

Social media = publishing

Communication

Workshops as dialogues

Not seeing mistakes as mistakes

Early years - art and fashion

Discovering the ‘unfathomable power’ of reality

The importance of the act of giving

The unique ethos of National Geographic magazine

Influences Mentioned:

Helmut Newton

Peter Lindbergh

Albert Watson

Arthur Elgort

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“Photography is 99% problem solving and 1% photography wrapped around 100% serendipity and good luck.”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB- THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

084 - Bruce Gilden

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 09:17:00 GMT

An Iconic street photographer with a unique style, Magnum Photos member Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He went to Penn State University but he found his sociology courses too boring for his temperament and he quit college. Bruce briefly toyed with the idea of being an actor but in 1967, he decided to buy a camera and to become a photographer. Although he did attend some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce mostly taught himself.

HIs abiding fascination for life on the streets began in childhood and was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and, of course, America. Since the seventies his work has been exhibited in museum and art galleries all over the world and is part of many collections.

Bruce's trademark photographic style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, its graphic qualities, and his original and in your face manner of shooting passers-by with a flash and often close in.

Bruce has received many awards and grants for his work, including a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and has published 18 monographs of his work. He joined Magnum Photos in 1998 and having lived most of his life in Manhatten, now lives in Beacon, New York with his wife and three cats.

In episode 084, Bruce discusses, among other things:

Being yourself

Recently discovered negatives

His difficult childhood

The drug habit that almost killed him

Advantages of working digitally

The criticisms directed at his Face series

What’s he’s learned

Why the kid from his Farm Boys and Farm Girls series (above) was crying uncontrollably

Influencial:

Lisette Model

Leon Levinstein

Ed van der Elsken

Shōmei Tōmatsu

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“I look in the mirror and I smile because of where I came from to where I am. And I do these pictures for me. It defines who I am. I’d love everybody to love them but if they don’t too bad, what can I say?”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB- THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

083 - Ed Kashi

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 07:06:00 GMT

Ed Kashi is a critically acclaimed, award-winning photojournalist, filmmaker, speaker, and educator who for 40 years has dedicated himself to documenting many of the social and geopolitical issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his work. A member of the VII Agency since 2010, Ed has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition.

In addition to editorial assignments, filmmaking and personal projects, Ed is a mentor to students of photography and an active participant in forums and lectures on photojournalism, documentary photography and multimedia. His early adoption of hybrid visual storytelling has produced a number of influential short films. Additionally, his editorial assignments and personal projects have generated eight books, including Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, THREE, and [Witness Number 8: Photojournalisms](Witness Number Eight: Photojournalisms).

In 2002, Ed, in partnership with his wife, the writer and filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media, a non-profit company which has subsequently produced numerous award-winning short films, exhibits, books, and multimedia pieces that explore significant social issues. They are currently engaged in a 5-year storytelling project with Rutgers University in Newark called Newest Americans, focused on immigration, for which they recently received a two year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In episode 083, Ed discusses, among other things:

His early adoption of video in his storytelling

Being all about the issues

Hitting a Wall in Peru

Using different parts of yourself

Being 100% there

Dealing with the emotional fallout

Experience and image fatigue

Being away for 8 months a year

Witness Number 8: Photojournalisms

Being a mentor and never having had one himself

The importance of creating a body of work

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

“...I’m asking people who are sick to let me into there lives. Like, what an asshole if I do that and then I’m not 100% there! Because on some level those people don’t need another person with a camera. So I better have a damned good reason to be getting into their lives and then I need to treat that with dignity and respect and the sort of preciousness of this opportunity that they’re giving me. And if I’m not at 100%, there’s something not good about that.”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

082 - Vanessa Winship: "And Time Folds" Special

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 07:30:00 GMT

This episode of A Small Voice celebrates the work and career of British photographer Vanessa Winship on the opening of And Time Folds, her first major UK solo exhibition now showing - in conjunction with a big retrospective of the work of Dorothea Lange - at London's Barbican Centre. You can hear Vanessa's earlier interview on Episode 3 of this podcast. Vanessa and I walked round the exhibition recording this chat as we went.

Here, more or less, is how the Barbican introduces the show: Vanessa's poetic gaze explores the fragile nature of our landscape and society and how memory leaves its mark on our collective and individual histories. Vanessa's oeuvre captures the ‘transition between myth and the individual’, revealing deeply intimate photographs that often appear to avoid specific contexts or any immediate political significance. The exhibition brings together an outstanding selection of more than 150 photographs, many of which have never been seen before in the UK, as well as a collection of unseen archival material.

Vanessa's practice focusses on the junction 'between chronicle and fiction, exploring ideas around concepts of borders, land, memory, desire, identity and history’. Having lived and worked in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus for more than a decade, her epic series' Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey (1999–2003) and Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction (2002–2006) investigate notions of periphery and edge on the frontiers of Eastern Europe, displaying the human condition through a vulnerable, yet intentionally incomplete, narrative. Capturing fragmentary images of collective rituals, means of transport and leisure activities, she presents a frieze of the human landscape in these regions, expressing society’s relationship to the terrain while remaining remote from any precise geo-political or historical events….

In episode 082, Vanessa and I talk about, among other things:

Why the work also belongs to her creative and life partner George Georgiou (Ep. 2)

Ismail Kadare and the oral tradition

The inclusion of audio readings

The importance to her of the written word

What makes a 'good' portrait

Serendipity

Thinking about the sound in pictures

Her very different new work from which the title of the exhibition is taken

The book of the show, published by Mack

Writers mentioned or influential:

Ismail Kadare

Strabo

Neil Ascherson

Richard Powers

Truman Capote

“People ofter say to me “oh your work is timeless” and in a certain way that’s how people read it, but actually it’s more about the folding of time; the here and now, but the going backwards and forwards and the doubling and the extending of time, the cycles of life.”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE COPY OF 'AND TIME FOLDS' BY VANESSA WINSHIP WHEN YOU JOIN!!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

081 - Maggie Steber

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 07:40:00 GMT

Documentary photographer Maggie Steber has worked in 67 countries focusing on humanitarian, cultural, and social stories. Her honors include the Leica Medal of Excellence, World Press Photo, the Overseas Press Club, Pictures of the Year, the Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri, the Alicia Patterson and Ernst Haas Grants. In 2013, Maggie was named as one of eleven Women of Vision by National Geographic Magazine, publishing a book and touring an exhibition in five American cities. More recently, she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Grant for her current project, The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma in which her dark alter-ego in an alternate universe where anything is possible and all ideas and characters are welcome.

For over three decades, Maggie has worked in Haiti documenting the history and culture of the Haitian people. Her essays on Haiti have appeared in The New York Times and she has a monograph published by Aperture titled Dancing on Fire: Photographs from Haiti.

Steber has served as a Newsweek Magazine contract photographer and as the Asst. Managing Editor of Photography and Features at The Miami Herald, overseeing staff projects that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. Her work is included in the Library of Congress, The Richter Library and in private collections. She has exhibited internationally. Clients include National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and many other.

Maggie is a member of VII Photos.

In episode 081, Maggie discusses, among other things:

Having to ‘flush out your subconscious’

The secret garden of Lily De Palma

Having to change direction

How she loves teaching her ‘little babies’

How being a picture editor helped her photography

How she secured her first job as photographer/reporter

Her Mother’s influence and documenting the end of her life

Her fascination with the warrior ethos

Haiti and The picture that changed her career

Why she likes to champion the underdog

Website | Facebook | Instagram

“I’m a documentary photographer. I’ve covered everything from war to fashion; i’ve worked for the Geographic; I’ve done all these stories, but I realised a few years ago that I had all of these things stored up in my head and I felt I was experiencing the tyranny of documentary photography, because that’s what described me. But we’re so much more than what we do…”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

080 - Photo London 2018 Special

Wed, 30 May 2018 09:03:00 GMT

This is the annual Photo London Special covering various shenanigans amid what is effectively a big industry trade fair at which galleries from around the world gather to sell prints, photographers with books to flog do signings for their fans and the mega famous have major exhibitions and take part in panel discussions or give talks and presentations.

Episode 080, features (In order of appearance):

Julia Fullerton Batten (Ep. 060)

Alys Tomlinson

Niall McDiarmid (Ep. 018)

Harry Borden (Ep. 015 & 016)

Annie Collinge (Ep. 049)

Muir Vidler (Ep. 059)

Tom Craig

George Georgiou (Ep. 002)

Vanessa Winship (Ep. 003)

David Monteleone

Stuart Freedman (Ep. 007)

Sooanne Berners from Mack Boooks
Peter Bialobrzeski

Tom Broadbent

Jenny Lewis (Ep. 064)

Olly Paisley

Terry O’Neill

Sian Davey (Ep. 066)

Rhiannon Adam (Ep. 079)

Laura Pannack (Ep. 006)

Mentioned:

Rafal Milach (Ep. 076)

BJP

Bruce Gilden

Dewi Lewis

Hayahisa Tomiyasu

Martin Kollar

Stewart Smith

Magnum Home

Luke Willis Thompson

Jo-Ann Calls

Michael Hoppen

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

079 - Rhiannon Adam

Wed, 16 May 2018 07:06:00 GMT

079 - Rhiannon Adam

Rhiannon Adam was born in County Cork, Ireland and currently lives and works in London. She was educated at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, and at the University of Cambridge, where she read English.

Her work is heavily influenced by her peripatetic childhood spent at sea, sailing around the world with her parents. Something she talks about during our chat. Virtually no photographic evidence of this period in her life exists and that fact ignited an interest in the influence of photography on recall, the notion of the photograph as a physical object, and the image as an intersection between fact and fiction – themes that continue throughout her work.

Her long-term projects straddle the boundary between art photography and social documentary, while subject matter is often focused on narratives relating to myth, loneliness, and the passage of time, particularly in relation to isolated communities. The results of these explorations are captured almost exclusively in ambient light through the hazy abstraction of degrading instant-film materials and colour negative film.

In 2015, supported by the BBC and the Royal Geographical Society, Rhiannon travelled to the remote island community of Pitcairn in the South Pacific. Pitcairn measures just two miles by one mile and is home to just 42 British subjects, descendants from the Mutiny on the Bounty. A decade ago, the island’s romantic image was tarnished by a string of high profile sexual abuse trials and, as a result, islanders are particularly reticent about accepting outsiders. With the duration of her trip dictated by the quarterly supply vessel, there would be no way off for three arduous months. Adam’s project is the first in-depth photographic project to take place on the island and is currently being exhibited at the Francesca Maffeo Gallery, in Leigh on sea, here in the U.K. until June 9th this year.

In episode 079, Rhiannon discusses, among other things:

Why it's taken 3 years to bring the work to fruition

Her unusual childhood at sea and why there are no pictures of that time.

The genesis of the project in a batch stockpiled, expired polaroid film.

Winning an award + Kickstarter to fund it.

The hostility she faced from the start

Daily life on Pitcairn

Her unwelcom bedroom visitor

The emotional upheaval of finally leaving

The ring that is here momento of the trip

Rhiannon's book 'Polaroid: The Missing Manual'.
The radio programme Rhiannon made for the BBC's Journey Of A Lifetime.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

“I think that having an individual personality and your own individual freedoms is just not something to be taken lightly. That’s been my big takeaway from Pitcairn. It’s just, everything else is going to be easy from here on in because, you know, it’s not there!”

THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.

**VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER**

USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!

INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

078 - Anush Babajanyan

Wed, 02 May 2018 07:39:00 GMT

Armenian photographer Anush Babajanyan is a member of the VII Photo Agency. Her work is focussed on social narratives related to women, issues of minorities, and the aftermath of the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, among other subjects.

In addition to working extensively in the Caucuses, she continues to photograph in Turkey, the Middle East and West Africa.

Much of Anush’s recent activity has been dedicated to peace building processes between Armenia and Turkey. In 2016, she co-founded the #BridgingStories project that brought together young photographers from Turkey and Armenia, in an effort to build peace between the two nations.

Before joining VII, Anush co-founded and was a member of women photographers’ collective 4Plus. She received a grant from the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Project in 2013 to assist with her continuing work between Armenia and Turkey and her photography has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, Foreign Policy Magazine, and various other international publications.

In episode 078, Anush discusses, among other things:

Self awareness while storytelling

Nagoro Karabakh

A year in Alabama, USA

Feeling lost and how to fix that

Everything takes time

The group she helped found, 4Plus

Her hand made book, The House of Culture

Unicef kids

Twins of Koumassi

What she’d tell her 20 year old self

Being good enough

Mentioned: John Stanmeyer (coming soon!)

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

“You should work and work and let the time pass and never lose direction, get to your long period of time and then maybe look back and see. But lack of confidence is completely pointless, it never takes you anywhere.”

077 - Nichole Sobecki

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 08:39:00 GMT

Nichole Sobecki is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is represented internationally by the photo agency VII. Nichole graduated from Tufts University before beginning her career in Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria, focusing on regional issues related to identity, conflict, and human rights. From 2012-2015 Nichole led Agence France-Presse’s East Africa video bureau, and was a 2014 Rory Peck Awards News Finalist for her coverage of the Westgate mall attacks in Kenya. Her work has been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the One World Media Awards, the Alexandra Boulat Award for Photojournalism, The Magenta Foundation, and The Jacob Burns Film Center, among others. Nichole sits on the board of Tufts University’s Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice, founded by Gary Knight. She is also a contributor to Everyday Africa, a collection of images shot on mobile phones across the continent, and an attempt to showcase the moments missing from dramatic news images — everyday life that is neither idealized nor debased. Nichole aims to create photographs and films that demand consideration for the lives of those represented – their joys, challenges, and ultimately their humanity. She has completed assignments throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Le Monde, and her work has been exhibited internationally. In episode 077, Nichole discusses, among other things: Diversity within the industry South Sudan Climate For Conflict Westgate Mall terrorist attack SoThe story behind the image above Income Pie Chart Working in Africa and resisting visual clichés Tips on funding work Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram “To be successful today, in this moment, in this field, I think you have to have a deeper understanding that this is your business. That while you are a creative person in this space this is also your business and to think about it in those terms. But then you also have to shift away from that and say what stories do I want to be telling and how do I want to be telling them... ” THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

076 - Rafal Milach

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:42:00 GMT

Polish photographer and visual artist Rafał Milach's work focuses on topics related to the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc. He is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, and the ITF Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. His award-winning photo books include The Winners, 7 Rooms, and the The First March of Gentlemen. Rafał has received scholarships from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, the Magnum Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation. He was a winner of the World Press Photo competition and is currently a finalist in the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for 2018. Rafał is a co-founder of the Sputnik Photos collective. His works have been widely exhibited in Poland and worldwide, and can be found in the collections of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the ING Polish Art Foundation, Kiyosato, the Museum of Photographic Arts (Japan), and Brandts in Odense (Denmark). In episode 076, Rafal discusses, among other things: Growing up in communist Poland Graphic design to photography - love at first sight 7 rooms In the car with R The importance of failure The first march of gentlemen Refusal Collaborating with his wife, book designer Ania Nałęcka The importance of experimentation and persistence Mentioned: Adam Broomberg Website | Facebook | Instagram “Searching for solutions is much more interesting than finding them. It’s a process of struggle but it’s a process of inspiration as well.” THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

075 - Matt Black

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:50:00 GMT

Matt Black is an associate member of Magnum Photos whose work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico. He has photographed over one hundred communities across 44 U.S. states for his project The Geography of Poverty. Other recent works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both of these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker. Matt is a contributor to the @everydayusa photographers’ collective and has produced video pieces for msnbc.com, Orion Magazine, and The New Yorker. He has taught photography with the Foundry Photojournalism Workshops, the Eddie Adams Workshop, Leica Fotografie International, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Anastasia Photo gallery in New York represents his prints. He became a Magnum nominee in 2015 and an Associate Member in 2017. He was named as Time's Instagram Photographer of the Year in 2014 having only started using the platform the previous year. He received the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2015. In 2016, he received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was named a Senior Fellow at the Emerson Collective. His work has also been honored by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and others. In episode 075, Matt discusses, among other things: Working on home soil in ‘the other California’, The Central Valley His newspaper apprenticeship - "a wonderful introduction" to what he would end up doing... Personal projects - deciding if he couldn’t do it on his terms he didn’t want to do it at all His transition from film to digital The Geography of Poverty Editing and sequencing The Monster in the Mountains How he creates his distinctive aesthetic Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram “To me at this point, what photography is about, the only thing I care about when it comes to my work or other people’s work is ‘what is this person trying to say?’, ‘what lies behind all this?’. That’s what I respond to in work is, ‘what is this person trying to say and is it being done honestly or is their something deceptive about it or is there some kind of corner cutting or is it too clever? Those are the things that influence me. It doesn’t matter [whether it’s] colour, black and white, digital, conceptual, documentary. It’s the spirit behind it that moves me.” THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

074 - Éanna de Fréine

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 09:38:00 GMT

Eanna de Freine is an Irish photographer now based in Berlin, Germany and formerly in London, UK (2011-2012), Taipei, Taiwan (2013-2014) and Osaka, Japan (2015-2017). His work focuses on our urban experiences. Eanna attended Goldsmiths's College, London, and received an M.A. in Photography & Urban Cultures. In 2011, he founded The Velvet Cell, an independent photobook publisher with a specific focus on projects that explore urbanism, architecture and our modern way of living in cities. To date The Velvet Cell has published over 60 books - including Eanna's Tales From Beneath The Arches and several of his others - by both up and coming photographers and seasoned experts such as Peter Bialobrzeski, Toshio Shibata, Greg Girard and Alexander Gronsky. Eanna works closely with each artist and usually designs the books himself. In 2017, Eanna wrote and published for free the Indie Photobook Publishing Guide, aimed at teaching others all he has learnt in his years of book publishing.

073 - Paul Lowe (pt.2)

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 11:25:00 GMT

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). THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A 10% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

072 - Tom Hunter

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 13:44:00 GMT

Tom Hunter describes himself as an artist using photography and film. He lives in the borough of Hackney in East London, a place which for 25 years has provided both the inspiration and the subject matter for much of his work. Tom is Professor of Photography at the London College of Communications, University of the Arts, London; an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of East London. He has earned several awards during his career, his latest being in 2016, the Rose Award for Photography at the Royal Academy, London. Tom graduated from the London College of Printing in 1994 with his work The Ghetto, which was acquired by the Museum of London where it remains on permanent display. He studied for his MA at the Royal College of Art, where, in 1996, he was awarded the Photography Prize by Fuji Film for his series Travellers. In 1998 his picture Woman Reading a Possession Order from his series Persons Unknown, won the Photographic Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2006 Tom became the only artist to have a solo photography show at the National Gallery, London with his series Living in Hell and Other Stories. Tom Hunter’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in major solo and group shows and he has published six books including, Le Crowbar (Here Press 2013) and The Way Home (Hatje Cantz, 2012). Tom has been commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London and The Royal Shakespeare Company. His works are in many collections around the world including; MOMA, New York, The V&A, London, Tate Modern and The Smithsonian, Washington. THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A 10% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU JOIN!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

071 - Paul Lowe (pt.1)

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:51:00 GMT

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). THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE PHOTOBOOK WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

070 - Christopher Anderson

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 08:07:00 GMT

Christopher Anderson was born in Canada in 1970 and grew up in west Texas, USA. In 2000, on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, he boarded a small wooden boat with 44 Haitians trying to sail to America. The boat sank in the Caribbean. The photographs earned Christopher the Robert Capa Gold Medal and marked the beginning of a 10 period as a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine and National Geographic Magazine. In 2011 he became New York Magazine’s first ever Photographer in Residence. Christopher joined Magnum Photos in 2005, he is the author of four monographs and is currently based in Barcelona, Spain. THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES. \*\*VERY SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER\*\* USE CODE 'ASMALLVOICE' TO CLAIM A FREE PHOTOBOOK WHEN YOU JOIN!!! https://charcoalbookclub.com - INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL

069 - Matt Writtle Live: Zen And The Art Of Self-Publishing A Photo Book

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 08:07:00 GMT

Matt Writtle is a documentary and portrait photographer from the Black Country in the English Midlands, now based in London. His practise is focused on “giving a voice to the person who is rarely heard, showing a fresh side to a face that we are weary of seeing, or revealing a world that we never new existed.”

Matt recently published his first photobook, Sunday: A Portrait of 21st Century England. The project documents how people living in England spend their time on this traditional day of rest and challenges the viewer to question the value of leisure time in a digital and consumerist culture: “Sundays evolve as we age; our childhood memories are often held dear and as adults, we associate Sunday with the chance to relax and switch off from work and the world. However, the last few decades have seen a huge shift away from traditional churchgoing, while consumerism and digital culture have changed the way we use our time. So what impact have these changes had on our ability to relax and be with ourselves? And how does the way we spend our leisure time reflect the nature of society in 21st century England?”

This in-depth conversation with Matt covering every detail of the book making process from shooting to marketing - informally entitled (by me) Zen And The Art Of Self Publishing A Photobook Without Losing Your Sanity Of Your Sense Of Humour - was recorded (by him) in front of a live audience at the A Side, B Side Gallery in Hackney, east London where Matt was exhibiting a small selection of prints from the series.

In Episode 069, Matt discusses, among other things:

The genesis of the project
Editing
Sequencing
Doing a book making workshop
Funding via Kickstarter
Book design
Decisions about printing
Using a professional PR person, Iliana Taliotis
The importance of a dedicated website
With contributions from John Angerson

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | The Book
“It was exhausting. I look back and it was exhausting...”

068 - Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 08:16:00 GMT

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photographer who for the past decade has worked for leading editorial publications all over the world on issues relating to women, population and war for a decade.

She is a Harvard Nieman Fellow 2016 and recently finished a year of research at the university on war, and how we tell stories about modern conflict. Anastasia is also currently a Logan Fellow at The Carey Institute for Global Good where she is working on a book about the visual representation of contemporary warfare and the photojournalists who cover it. She is also a TED fellow. Anastasia has written about her experiences as a photojournalist for The New York Times, TIME LightBox, Nieman Reports and National Geographic.

As a photographic storyteller, her focus has been on long-form narrative reportage for monthly magazines. She is a National Geographic Magazine contributor and her other clients include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian.

Her first book MAIDAN – Portraits from the Black Square, which documents the 2014 Ukrainian uprising in Kiev, was published by GOST books the same year.

Anastasia’s work has been exhibited internationally, in spaces such as The Saatchi Gallery, The Frontline Club, and The National Portrait Gallery in London, SIDE gallery in Newcastle, Fovea Exhibitions in New York, Pikto Gallery in Toronto and The New Mexico Museum of Modern Art in Santa Fe.

A wide variety of organizations have recognized and supported her projects through awards such as the POYi, Sony World Photography Awards, Royal Photographic Society Bursaries and the FNAC Grant at Visa Pour L’Image.

Anastasia has a BA degree in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales Newport and an MA from the London College of Communication. She is regularly engaged with education, teaching at leading universities in Europe and the USA, including at MIT, Harvard and Columbia University.

In Episode 068, Anastasia discusses, among other things:

Photographing the Rohingya refugee crisis

Instagram and socail media

Her unconventional gypsy upbringing

Sexism within the photo world

Peshmerga project

Studying the way we tell stories about war and conflict

Russia and Ukraine and her very useful friend Camilla Naprous (with whom she is making a book)

Recycling a 'failed' idea to create her successful Maidan Square project

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

“I do make photographs for a whole host of different reasons but one of them is also because this is the life that I’ve chosen for myself, and its beyond a job or a career. and it’s how I want to live and experience the world...”

067 - Chris Floyd Live - The Verve: Inside The Bubble

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 06:34:00 GMT

Back in the mid-nineties, a young Chris Floyd, in the early stages of his photographic career, was offered the opportunity to go to the USA for the first time by a brand new British magazine called Loaded. The one week assignment was to shoot an up and coming band from the north of England called The Verve and not surprisingly Chris jumped at the chance. Thus began a working relationship for which Chris was given complete access to the band during their meteoric rise to huge global success from late 1996 to 1997, when he documented the recording, touring and promotion of their era-defining album Urban Hymns (which remains one of the biggest selling British albums of all time) until the band, in time honoured rock n roll fashion, split up at the height of their success. Twenty years later Chris has published a book of the photographs he took during that time, published by Reel Art Press. As well as being a document of these events, the book is a celebration of what it meant to be young in the last moments of societal unself-awareness, before the explosion of the internet and social media, and it includes a section dedicated to people’s memories of 1997. Chris reflects, “For a while it felt like being at the centre of the universe. ... We were in a brief golden era, when it looked like the world was unshackling itself and beginning to develop a more advanced and progressive attitude. We seemed to be in a decade that had taken a holiday from history. I am grateful and thankful that I got to live out my twenties in such a fertile, peaceful and creative period.” Michael Holden writes in his introduction, “Those years, it turns out, were the twilight of analogue consciousness and certain seeming certainties about the world at large. Whatever we are now, we were not then. This isn’t just the everyday past we’re looking at, but another planet.” The release of the book was accompanied by an exhibition at the Art Space Bermondsey Project in London, where we recorded this conversation in front of a live audience comprised of both photography enthusiasts and loyal fans of the band.

066 - Sian Davey

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 09:34:00 GMT

Sian Davey is a photographer with a background in Fine Art and Social Policy who had a successful career as a psychotherapist for many years before deciding to jack it all in and pursue a new career in photography which so far, to all intents and purposes, appears to be going swimmingly.

Her work is an investigation of the psychological landscapes of herself, her family and her community, all of which are central to her practice. Her first series focussed on her young daughter Alice, who she started photographing at the age of one. The project was eventually published as a book by Trolley Books entitled Looking for Alice which was shortlisted for the Aperture Best Book Award at Paris Photo 2016.

Her most recent series Martha focussing on her teenage step-daughter and grew as a response to her question to Sian: 'why don't you photograph me anymore?' So Sian did - turning her lens on Martha and her friends to produce an intimate collaboration.

Sian has recently completed her MA and MFA in photography. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Arnold Newman Award for New Directions in Portraiture and the Prix Virginia Woman's Photography Award. Her work was included in the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Award for the last three consecutive years. She is represented by the Michael Hoppen Gallery.

In episode 066, Sian discusses, among other things:

The confluence of circumstances that led to photography

Going nuts for 10 years

Looking for Alice

Being all or nothing

Martha

Together

Dealing with hitting 50

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

065 - Magda Rakita

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 08:45:00 GMT

Magda Rakita is a documentary photographer and non-fiction storyteller whose work employs not only photography but multimedia presentations, participatory projects and writing. She works with the media and various NGO’s worldwide and her personal projects focus on health and social issues affecting women, children and the older generation. In 2013 she completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, graduating with a distinction and since then has produced stories from, among other places, Liberia and Afghanistan. Her work has been exhibited internationally, has gained recognition in several international competitions and was included in the recent Thames & Hudson book featuring a selection of today's outstanding women practitioners, Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now. Magda is currently working on a book project entitled One Point Seven, which will feature the stories of a few of the 1.7% of the world’s population that have some intersex traits, of which Magda is one. She was diagnosed at 15, took a further 15 years to find a support group and quite recently began talking openly about the subject for the first time. She lives in Cambridge, England.

064 - Jenny Lewis

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:45:00 GMT

Jenny Lewis grew up in Essex in the South East of England, went up north to Lancashire to take a degree in fine art at Preston University and moved back south to London where she got a badly paid job at Metro, one of London’s major photographic labs. It was here that her early photographic education began, spending her days producing and then examining hundreds of contact sheets from a diverse range of professional photographers. She also made the other kind of contacts within the London photo community, which allowed her to transition into assisting and eventually into becoming a jobbing editorial photographer, shooting mainly portraits for a variety of national newspapers and magazines. Alongside that work, which she continues to this day, Jenny pursues a range of personal work, much of which centres on her experience of living and working in the east London borough of Hackney which has now been her beloved home for 20 years. Two of these personal projects have been published as books by Hoxton Mini Press: One Day Young, captures mothers and their newborn babies within the first 24 hours of birth, and Hackney Studios, featuring environmental portraits of the network of creatives who live and work alongside her in the borough. One of Jenny’s recent portraits, featuring Corrine, a survivor of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire (above), was selected for inclusion in the current nationwide exhibition Portrait of Britain.

063 - Giles Duley

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 07:31:00 GMT

Throughout the 90's, Giles Duley, worked as a successful fashion and music photographer for ten years. However, having become disillusioned with celebrity culture, he decided to abandon photography and left London, worked in a pub and eventually began work as a full-time carer. It was in this role that he rediscovered his craft and its power to tell the stories of those without a voice. In 2000, he returned to photography, personally funding trips to document the work of NGOs and the stories of those affected by conflict across the world. In 2011, Giles lost both legs and his left arm after stepping on an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Afghanistan whilst on a routine patrol with troops from the 1st Squadron of the 75th Cavalry Regiment of the U..S. Army. Very few people exppected him to live. And when he did he was told he would never walk again and that his career was over. However, characteristically stubborn, Duley told his doctors “I’m still a photographer”, and returned to work in Afghanistan less than 18 months later, after a long and arduous process of rehabilitation involving continuous operations, over 30 in all. Giles has since documented stories in Lebanon, Bangladesh, Colombia, Iraq and Jordan amongst others. His return to Afghanistan was the feature of the award-winning documentary, Walking Wounded: Return to the Frontline. His work has since been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, and he has talked about his experiences on television, radio and at several international and national events. His TEDx talk was voted one of the top ten TED talks of 2012. Giles is a Trustee for the Italian NGO Emergency and ambassador for Sir Bobby Charlton’s landmine charity Find A Better Way. In 2013, he won the May Chidiac Award for Bravery in Journalism and the AIB Founders Award for Outstanding Achievement, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2016 he was commissioned by the UNHCR to document the refugee crisis across Europe and the Middle East, the result of which was the book I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See. By June 2017 Gile had already travelled to over a dozen countries in the continuation of his project Legacy of War, a five year undertaking exploring the long-term, global effects of conflict which Giles sees as his defining work to date. GILES HAS A SOLO EXHIBITION (AND SUPPER CLUB!) ON NOW - OCT 4TH TO OCT 15TH - AT THE OLD TRUMAN BREWERY IN LONDON. DETAILS HERE. “You know, you spend a year in hospital, you lose a year of your life, you think you may never walk again, you may never even step out in the sunshine again. When everything’s taken away from you, what you get given back feels more precious than ever. And so all those things that we take for granted, the simple things in life, meant everything. And for me photography is in my core…”

062 - Finbarr O'Reilly

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 07:08:00 GMT

Finbarr O'Reilly spent 12 years as a Reuters correspondent and staff photographer based in West and Central Africa and won the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year. His coverage of conflicts and social issues across Africa has earned him numerous awards from the National Press Photographer's Association and Pictures of the Year International for both his multimedia work and photography, which has been exhibited internationally. Finbarr was based in Senegal for 8 years, spent two years living in Congo and Rwanda and his multimedia exhibition Congo on the Wire debuted at the 2008 Bayeux War Correspondent's Festival before then travelling to Canada and the US. Finbarr embedded regularly with coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan between 2008-2011 before moving to Israel in 2014, where he covered the summer war in Gaza. He is a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow and a writer in residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good, a 2015 Yale World Fellow, a 2014 Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a 2013 Harvard Nieman Fellow. He is among those profiled in Under Fire: Journalists in Combat, a documentary film about the psychological costs of covering war. Earlier this year, Finbarr, along with co-author, retired U.S. Marine Sgt. Thomas James Brennan (pictured above on the left, shortly after suffering severe concussion from an RPG round explosion), published a joint memoir with Penguin Random House about their experiences in Afghanistan entitled Shooting Ghosts. Their story about the unpredictability of war and its aftermath is told in alternating first-person narratives, and explores the things they’ve seen and done, the ways they have been affected, and how they have navigated the psychological aftershocks of war and wrestled with reforming their own identities and moral centres. Finbarr is currently based in London.

061 - Brian Griffin

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 07:11:00 GMT

Brian Griffin was born in Birmingham in 1948 and grew up in the neighbouring Black Country, in the English midlands. He started his working life at 16 working in a factory, where he remained for 5 years, before finally making his escape to Manchester Polytechnic where he took a degree in photography, shortly after which he left for London in pursuit of a photographic career as a fashion photographer. It was there that he met and was mentored by Roland Schenk, the charismatic art director on Management Today magazine, who offered him a job as a corporate photographer. The rest, as they say, is history. Brian was later considered 'the photographer of the decade' by the Guardian Newspaper in 1989; 'the most unpredictable and influential British portrait photographer of the last decades' by the British Journal of Photography in 2005 and 'one of Britain’s most influential photographers' by the World Photography Organisation in 2015. In 1991, his book Work was awarded the ‘Best Photography Book in the World’ prize at Barcelona Primavera Fotografica. Brian is patron of the Format Photography Festival in Derby; in September 2013, he received the ‘Centenary Medal’ from the Royal Photographic Society in recognition of a lifetime achievement in photography; and in 2014 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University. Brian Griffin’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of many major art institutions and he has published twenty or so books, including his latest, Pop which features some of the highlights of his album artwork and band photography from decades working in the music industry with such artists as Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, Depeche Mode and Kate Bush. In other words, he’s a bit of a legend.

060 - Julia Fullerton-Batten

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 08:02:00 GMT

Julia Fullerton-Batten is an acclaimed and exhibited fine-art and commercial photographer whose body of work now encompasses twelve major projects and two photo books spanning two decades as a professional. Julia was born to a German mother and English father in Bremen, Germany and moved to the USA at the age of two. When she was 16, after her parents divorce, she and her siblings moved with their father to the UK where she completed her secondary education. Subsequently she assisted professional photographers for five years before a first commercial assignment kick-started her career in 1995. The foundation of her subsequent success was Teenage Stories (2005), later published as a book, an evocative exploration of the transitional phase from teenage girl to womanhood. Julia admits to a pronounced semi-autobiographical influence in much of her earlier work, often falling back on recollections of her own formative and teenage years, her parents divorce, and her own early relationships. Julia’s use of unusual locations, highly creative settings and street-cast models, accented with cinematic lighting are hallmarks of her distinctive style. Her most recent project, The Act, shot in 2016, is a comprehensive study of the performing and private lives of fifteen women active in the UK sex industry. Her still images are enhanced by interviews with these women, captured both in video and text. The Act was published in 2017 as a book by Sutherl&Editions, in a limited edition of 300. Julia has won numerous awards for both her commercial and fine-art work, and is a Hasselblad Master. She lives in London with her husband and two young sons. In episode 060, Julia discusses, among other things: An apprenticeship assisting Travels with a camera Her first big commercial job Teenage Stories Mothers and Daughters Big set-ups and complex lighting The Act Website | Facebook | Instagram “Now and then, just before a big shoot that I’ve put together, I think ‘why have I done this? Why have I created this big set? And relying on so many people, when actually all I wanna do is just take pictures.’”

059 - Muir Vidler

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 07:12:00 GMT

Muir Vidler is a Scottish photographer whose work, often exploring humorous cultural and visual contradictions, straddles the increasingly blurred line between fine art and documentary. Born in Edinburgh, Muir previously worked as a chef, street entertainer and cruise ship photographer, where he learnt the rudiments of photography and managed to save enough money to enrol in a post-graduate diploma in photojournalism at the London College of Printing. In 2001 his portrait series of ageing British rebels and mavericks, Rebels Without a Pause was published by the Sunday Times Magazine. Since then Muir has remained in London and divides his time between commissions for magazines, corporations and record labels and personal, self-assigned projects. Muir's work has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, Vogue and Vanity Fair. He is represented by Rove Gallery in the UK and the Mindy Solomon Gallery in the USA and is currently working on his first photobook, entitled Everything Is True. In episode 59, Muir discusses, among other things: The pros and cons of sharing an office His new book project, Everything Is True His style of portrait photography Growing up - California vs. Scotland What he learnt as a cruise ship photographer (250th at F11) Shooting self- assigned projects on spec. A Libyan beauty pageant and meeting Colonel Gadaffi Books mentioned: Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov Stoner - John Williams Photographers mentioned: Steve Pyke Richard Avedon Gareth McConnell Harry Benson Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram “I still shoot like I shot then all the time now. I’ll tell you what I learnt: outside, bright sunlight, 100ASA, 250th, F11.”

058 - Photo Meet 2017 Special

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 17:25:00 GMT

This is a special episode from Offspring Photo Meet, an annual gathering here in London, described by founder Mimi Mollica, who you can hear on episode 014 of this podcast, as a ‘portfolio review on steroids’, but also as a kind of micro photo festival. I went down there to sample the atmosphere, see what it was all about, find out what had brought people there and to try and answer the question 'what exactly is the point of a portfolio review anyway'.

057 - Carolyn Drake

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 07:09:00 GMT

Magnum Photos member Carolyn Drake studied Media/Culture and History at Brown University, where she became interested in the ways that history and reality are purposefully shaped and revised over time, and in the ways that artists can interrupt and shift these narratives. After graduating, she worked for multimedia companies in New York but eventually left her office job at the age of 30 to engage with the physical world through photography. In 2006, she moved to Ukraine, where she spent a year examining cultural partitions in a country pursuing a unified national identity - a cloistered Soviet era orphanage near the European border; private, state-owned and illegal coal mining groups vying for influence in the Donbass; Crimean muslims claiming land rights. She made images everywhere, not as much for historical documentation as to come to terms with presumptions stemming from her Cold War childhood in the USA. The experience made her question the journalistic impulse to define, and to look for ways photography can emphasize ambiguity. Based in Istanbul between 2007 and 2013, Carolyn traveled frequently to Central Asia to work on two long term photography projects. The first, Two Rivers, is a poetic exploration of the shifting borders, histories, and life systems between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The interconnectedness of ecology, culture and political power come to view in a territory on the edge of global attention. The second Central Asia project is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. Framed between passages from Nurmuhemmet Yasin's contraband story Wild Pigeon, the book puts forth a counter narrative about China's western frontier, Islam, and the freedoms associated with modernity. In the collaborative images, contrasting visual tools intersect, drawing attention to the awkward, difficult, sometimes beautiful cultural exchange that lies at the root of this series. Carolyn returned to the US in 2014 and is now based in Vallejo, California. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lange Taylor Prize, a Fulbright fellowship, and the Anamorphosis prize, among other awards. Her work is in the collections at the SFMOMA, Soros Foundation, Library of Congress, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is an associate at Magnum Photos.

056 - Robin Maddock

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 07:13:00 GMT

English photographer Robin Maddock is probably best known for his personal approach to documentary photography, looking at different places and the states of mind of people that inhabit them. His first two photography books were about aspects of England. Our kids Are Going to Hell (2009) is a portrait of the social interactions of youth and the police in Hackney, London. This work was nominated for the Deutsche Börse photography prize and was runner up at Photo España’s ‘discovery’ portfolio prize. Robin’s second title, God Forgotten Face (2011) continued his work on aspects of everyday English society, focussing on the South Western town of Plymouth.This work was selected by Martin Parr as his choice in the Smithsonian magazine’s “The new stars of photography” edition in February 2012. Both titles are published by Trolley Books and are included in the The Photobook, A History: Volume 3, edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. Robin’s third book entitled III (2014) was a major stylistic departure depicting a playful black and white look at the streets of America on the west coast. It was featured in the New York Times 6th floor blog, Time Magazine Lightbox and the Financial Times among others. III was shortlisted at PHESP as one of the books of 2014 and was selected byJason Fulford for Time Magazine online, as his pick of the year. For his current book project, Engerland, due for completion this year, 2017, Robin has returned to focussing on his native land, looking at small towns and the countryside. It is more portrait based than previous works here and attempts to deal with the problem of the picturesque landscape.

055 - Rena Effendi

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 06:29:00 GMT

Rena Effendi is an Azerbaijani photographer, born in the capital, Baku, whose work focuses on issues of post-conflict society, social justice, and the oil industry’s effect on people and the environment. Rena, as she puts it herself, spent half her childhood in one country and the rest in another, growing up during the war, political instability, and economic collapse that marked Azerbaijan's path to post-Soviet independence. From 2002 to 2008, Rena followed a 1,700-kilometer oil pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey collecting stories along the way and documenting the impact this multibillion-dollar project had on impoverished farmers, fishermen, and other ordinary citizens. This six-year journey became her first book Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives Along the Pipeline, published in 2009. The project received numerous awards, including a Getty Images Editorial Grant, a Fifty Crows International Fund Award, a Magnum Foundation Caucasus Photographer Award, and a Mario Giacomelli Memorial Fund Award. In 2012, Rena published her second monograph Liquid Land. The book presents a lyrical narrative, exploring themes of fragility and environmental decay, in which her images of communities living dangerously among the oil spills and industrial ruin of Baku and the rest of the Absheron Peninsula are paired with photographs of some of the 30,000 moths and butterflies collected from across the the Soviet Union by her father, Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to lepidopterology - the study of these beautiful insects. Over the past 10 years, Rena has covered stories across the post-Soviet region, as well as in Turkey and Iran, including the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, female victims of heroin and sex trafficking in Kyrgyzstan, and the hidden lives of youth in Tehran. In 2011, she received the Prince Claus Fund Award for Cultural Development and in 2012, Rena was short-listed for the Prix-Pictet Global Award for Photography and Sustainability, for her series documenting life of the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and in 2014 won 2nd and 3rd places in Observed Portrait Stories and Observed Potrait Singles categories of the World Press Photo Contest. Rena's work has featured in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, and National Geographic. She is represented by National Geographic Creative and ILEX Gallery and is currently based in Istanbul, Turkey.

054 - Photo London 2017 Special

Wed, 31 May 2017 06:10:00 GMT

This years field report from the annual Photo London festival, featuring a personal, chaotic and non-comprehensive selection of chats, discussions, soundbites and random witterings.

053 - Spencer Murphy

Wed, 17 May 2017 09:53:00 GMT

This week on the podcast I chart to Spencer Murphy, who has just published his first photo book, Urban Dirt Bikers, with Hoxton Mini Press. Their website describes Spencer as a fine art and commercial photographer. I would add documentary photographer to that. But he is probably best known for his portrait photography. In 2013 he won the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, his work having been selected for the exhibition six times beforehand. Spencer’s personal work is often concerned with the notion of the outsider; those who live an alternative, rebel lifestyle away from – or in spite of – our preconceptions of what is deemed to be normal. Spencer was born in 1978 and grew up in the Kentish countryside. Raised in relative isolation, miles from the nearest shop or school, Spencer often found himself with only his imagination for company and the surrounding woodland as his playground. It was a combination of this imagination and an early discovery of his mother’s back issues of Life and National Geographic that sparked an early enthusiasm for photography at the age of 11. As a result, his parents bought him his first camera and photography quickly became a channel for his creativity. Spencer now divides his time between creating self initiated personal projects and taking on photographic commissions. He has contributed to many magazines, including The Guardian Weekend, The Telegraph Magazine, Time, Monocle and Wallpaper. His portraits have also appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone Magazine, GQ and Dazed and Confused. He has exhibited throughout Europe and North America and his work is now held in the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection.

052 - Daniella Zalcman

Wed, 03 May 2017 07:38:00 GMT

Daniella Zalcman is a documentary photographer based in London and frequently to be found in New York City, where she took a degree in architecture at Columbia University and began her photographic career as a jobbing newspaper photographer for the New York Daily News. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and a member of Boreal Collective. Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of indigenous children in North America. She won the 2016 FotoEvidence Book Award, the Magnum Foundation's Inge Morath Award, and the Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award for her project Signs of Your Identity, featuring double exposure portraits of and testimony from survivors of Canada's government operated Indian Residential Schools, institutions which, for over a century, attempted to forcibly assimilate young indigenous pupils into western Canadian culture. The project is available as a book. Daniella's work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, National Geographic, and CNN, among others. Her photos have been exhibited internationally, and select projects are represented by Anastasia Photo Gallery, LUMAS, and Subject Matter. She regularly lectures at high schools, universities, museums, and conferences, and is available for assignments and speaking engagements internationally. Daniella recently founded the website womenphotograph.com, a directory of female documentary and editorial photographers intended as a resource for commissioning editors, picture desks and anyone else who might wish to hire them. Every photographer in the database is available for freelance assignments and has five or more years of experience. In Episode 52, Daniella discusses, among other things: Her long term projectSigns of Your Identity Her apprenticeship on The New York Daily News Her income pie chart womenphotograph.com Stories of every day sexism Accountability in photojournalism

051 - Ian Derry

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 08:31:00 GMT

Ian Derry started his career 35 years ago at the tender age of 15 when he embarked on an old school apprenticeship in regional newspaper photography, cutting his teeth in the early 80’s during a huge national news story: the Falklands war. From that solid and in many ways enviable foundation there followed a natural and necessary move to London where he immediately began working for the national press, both broadsheets and tabloids alike, as both a freelancer and a staff photographer, gaining a dizzying breadth of experience from hard news stories during the conflict in Bosnia to celebrity portraits, catwalk fashion shoots and everything in between. Ian then reinvented himself completely, moving away from the newspaper world and establishing himself as a top flight portrait, advertising and commercial phottographer, mainly focussing on ‘A’ list actors and celebrities and sport and fitness. His latest reinvention sees him transition from stills to the moving image. His second short film, Johanna, about Finnish world champion under ice freediver Johanna Nordblad was self-funded with the insurance payout from a serious cycling accident and has been a massive viral hit online with 15 million views and counting, kickstarting Ian’s directing career and quickly earning him a place on the roster of film production company and directing agents Archer’s Mark.

050 - David Alan Harvey

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 05:59:00 GMT

Magnum legend David Alan Harvey was born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised in Virginia. He discovered photography at the age of eleven. Thereafter he purchased a used Leica with savings from his newspaper route and began photographing his family and neighborhood in 1956. When he was twenty, he lived with and documented the lives of a black family in Norfolk, Virginia, and the resulting book, Tell It Like It Is, was published in 1968 (and recently republished by Burn Books). David was named Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in 1978. He went on to shoot over forty essays for National Geographic magazine and has covered stories around the world, including projects on French teenagers, the Berlin Wall, Maya culture, Vietnam, Native Americans, Mexico, Naples, and Nairobi. He has published two major books based on his extensive work on the Spanish cultural migration into the Americas, Cuba and Divided Soul, and his book Living Proof (2007) deals with hip-hop culture. In 2011, David produced an award-winning book of his work from Rio De Janeiro entitled (based on a true story), which was highly acclaimed for both the photography and its innovative design by David's son, filmmaker Bryan Harvey. The entire creative process during the shoot was documented on the website theriobook.com, where for $1.99 you could (and still can!) effectively attend a virtual workshop to gain an invaluable insight into David's working practices and benefit from his many years of teaching and mentoring. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Nikon Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Workshops, seminars and mentoring young photographers are an important part of his life. He is founder and editor of the award-winning Burn magazine, featuring iconic and emerging photographers in print and online. David joined Magnum photos as a nominee in 1993 and became a full member in 1997. He lives in The Outer Banks, North Carolina and New York City.

049 - Annie Collinge

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 07:06:00 GMT

Annie Collinge started her career part way through her degree at Brighton University at the tender age of seventeen, assisting esteemed portrait photographer Harry Borden (ep. 15 & 16). She went on to work extensively in the editorial world for publications such as Vice, Dazed, Pylot and The Guardian. She has simultaneously worked on various personal projects which tend to straddle the increasingly opaque divide between documentary and fine art practice. She has had various solo shows including at the Underwater Mermaid Theatre at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans for a project that we discuss in the interview. Her work has been included twice in the Taylor Wessing portrait prize show and she has twice won the Magenta Foundations Flash Forward award. Her most recent project is provisionally entitled Buzz of a Dead Bee. It’s a miniature gallery based in a dolls house antique shop, launching late 2017. The gallery will stage miniature exhibitions by a variety of artists and will change location according to which artist is showing in it. Lined up so far are Lined up so far are Riitta Ikonen, Julie Verhoeven and Rottingdean Bazaar. The project is a comment on how costly it is for artists and photographers to stage exhibitions, since on the internet, it doesn’t actually matter that the work created for it is on a small scale.

048 - Mark Power

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 09:22:00 GMT

As a child, Magnum photographer Mark Power discovered his father's home-made enlarger in the family attic, a contraption consisting of an upturned flowerpot, a domestic light bulb and a simple camera lens. His interest in photography probably began at this moment, though he later went to art college to study life-drawing and painting instead. After graduating, he travelled for two years around South-East Asia and Australia and it was at this point that he began to realise he enjoyed using a camera more than a pencil and decided to 'become a photographer' on his return to England, two years later, in 1983. He then worked in the editorial and charity markets for nearly ten years, before he began teaching in 1992. This coincided with a shift towards long-term, self initiated projects which now sit comfortably alongside a number of large-scale commissions in the industrial sector. For many years his work has been seen in numerous galleries and museums across the world, and is in several important collections, both public and private, including the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To date Power has published eight books: The Shipping Forecast (1996), a poetic response to the esoteric language of daily maritime weather reports; Superstructure (2000), a documentation of the construction of London's Millennium Dome; The Treasury Project (2002), about the restoration of a nineteenth-century historical monument: 26 Different Endings (2007), which depicts those landscapes unlucky enough to fall just off the edge of the London A-Z, a map which could be said to define the boundaries of the British capital; The Sound of Two Songs (2010), the culmination of his five year project set in contemporary Poland following her accession to the European Union; Mass (2013), an investigation into the power and wealth of the Polish Catholic church; Die Mauer ist Weg! (2014), about chance and choice when confronted, accidentally, with a major news event - in this case the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment (2016), a collaboration with the poet Daniel Cockrill about pre-Brexit England. Mark Power joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002, and became a full Member in 2007. Meanwhile, in his other life, he is visiting Professor of Photography at the University of Brighton, on the south coast of England, where he lives with his partner Jo, their children Chilli (b.1998) and Milligan (b.2002) and their dog Kodak.

047 - Peter Van Agtmael

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 07:36:00 GMT

Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington DC in 1981. He studied history at Yale University, where his interest in journalism led him to take a photography course, during which he had an almost mystical experience and realised immediately that he'd found his calling. His work largely concentrates on America, looking at issues of conflict, identity, power, race and class. He also works extensively on the Israel/Palestine conflict and throughout the Middle East. He has won the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for a Young Photographer, the Lumix Freelens Award, the Aaron Siskind Grant, a Magnum Foundation Grant as well as awards from World Press Photo, American Photography Annual, POYi, The Pulitzer Center, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, FOAM and Photo District News. Peter joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a full member in 2013. His book, Disco Night Sept 11, is a chronicle of America's wars in the post-9/11 era from 2006-2013. The photographs shift back and forth from Iraq and Afghanistan to the USA, unsparingly capturing the violent, ceaseless cost, but also the mystery and the madness, the beauty and absurdity at the core of each conflict. The narrative is complemented by nineteen gatefolds which elaborate on places and individuals. The book was released in 2014 by Red Hook Editions, a Brooklyn-based publishing venture of which Peter is a founder and partner. Disco Night Sept 11 was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award and was named a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Mother Jones, Vogue, American Photo and Photo Eye. You can still order a copy direct from Red Hook Editions. Peter's most recent book, the sequel to Disco Night..., is Buzzing at the Sill, a book about America in the shadows of the wars and about coming home from years of covering conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to understand his experiences and his country. The work is a stew of reflections on war, memory, militarism, identity, race, class, family, surrealism and the landscape.

046 - Briony Campbell

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 08:11:00 GMT

Briony Campbell works both as a photographer and, increasingly, as a film maker. Here’s what she says on her website: I work with photography and video, to tell stories about who we are and how we understand each other. I shoot promos, documentaries, events and campaigns for arts, education, research and social innovation clients. She has a Masters degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication and her graduation project in 2009 recieved widespread attention and was therefore instrumental in getting her career off to a flying start. The Dad Project was Briony’s attempt to document and make sense of her father’s terminal cancer and his eventual death. Her more recent ongoing project - Love in Translation explores stories about British/African couples living in Africa and will soon be showcased on a dedicated website at loveintranslation.net

045 - Bieke Depoorter

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 12:59:00 GMT

Magnum member Bieke Depoorter is a 30 year old Belgian photographer. Bieke has a masters degree in photography from the Royal academy of fine art in Ghent and in 2009 won the Magnum expression award for her work in Russia, a project which later became her first book entitled Ou Menya in which she established a unique working practice whereby she stays each night with a different stranger or stranger she has met and photographs them in their home. She then repeated the process in the USA, which became the book I Am About To Call It A Day and has since done the same thing in Egypt, which will be made into a book later this year. She became a magnum nominee in 2012 and was made a full member last year, in 2016.

044 - Mark Neville

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 10:46:00 GMT

“Mark Neville has re-imagined what documentary photography could be, should be. Instead of the bland ‘deconstructions’ that pass so lazily as ‘critical’ in contemporary art, he makes extraordinary pictures and finds extraordinary ways to get them back to those he has photographed” — David Campany

In episode 044, Mark discusses, among other things:

His upcoming exhibition, Child's Play

New work in Ukraine

Art school origins

The Port Glasgow Book Project

Deeds Not Words

Experiences as a war artist and with PTSD

Doing a book with Steidl

Website | Twitter | Instagram

“If you look around at the world today, it’s pretty horrendous what’s happening, isn’t it? So I think as photographers we’ve got a real responsibility to say something about that and do something about it. And if really believe that just reproducing an image in a newspaper or having a show in a posh gallery is gonna change much then you’re WRONG.”

043 - Simon Roberts

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 07:22:00 GMT

Simon Roberts is a British photographer based in Brighton, on the south coast of England, whose work deals with our relationship to landscape and notions of identity and belonging. Often employing expansive, large-format landscape photographs, his approach is one of creating wide-ranging surveys of our time, which communicate on important social, economic and political issues. Simon is perhaps best known for his major long-term project We English, for which he undertook a 9 month road trip around England in a camper van, accompanied by his pregnant wife and 2 year old daughter. The resulting work has been exhibited widely, touring to over thirty national and international venues and was published as a book by Chris Boot and voted by Martin Parr as one of the best photography books of the past decade. He’s had solo shows at the National Media Museum, Bradford, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Multimedia Art Museum Moscow. His photographs reside in major public and private collections, including the George Eastman House, Deutsche Börse Art Collection and Wilson Centre for Photography. In recognition for his work, Roberts has received several awards including the Vic Odden Award - offered for a notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer, along with bursaries from the National Media Museum, John Kobal Foundation and grants from Arts Council England. He was commissioned as the official Election Artist by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee to produce a record of the 2010 General Election on behalf of the UK Parliament. In 2012 he was granted access by the International Olympic Committee to photograph the London Olympics and most recently was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, UK (2013). As well as We English has published two other critically acclaimed monographs, Motherland (Chris Boot, 2007) and Pierdom (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2013).

042 - Phillip Ebeling

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 11:30:00 GMT

London-based German photographer Philip Ebeling grew up in a small village in Germany before making his escape to London at the age of 19 where he took a degree in photography at the London College of Printing. He subsequently won the Observer Hodge Award which kickstarted his career as a jobbing editiorial portrait photographer. In 2010, along with his wife, Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur, who featured on episode 11 of the podcast, he founded Fishbar a bookshop, gallery space and photo book publisher here in east London. His first book, published under the fishbar inprint was Land Without Past, a deeply personal photographic essay on growing up in a small village in the north of Germany and a meditation on the relationship contemporary Germany has with its past. The new book is about the forgotten parts of London. Leaving behind the landmarks of the centre, London Ends takes the viewer on a journey to the places where the city ceases to be a city and becomes a series of amalgamated villages. These places where London ‘ends’ are the places that Philipp has been drawn to with his camera for many years.

041 - Diana Markosian

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 08:51:00 GMT

Interview deleted. Listen to this short message for a brief explanation as to why.

040 - Gideon Mendel

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 14:07:00 GMT

Gideon Mendel's intimate style of image making and long-term commitment to projects has earned him international recognition and many awards, over a 30+ year career as a documentary photographer and social activist. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1959, studied Psychology and African History at the University of Cape Town and began photographing in the 1980s during the dark days of apartheid. It was his work as ‘struggle photographer’ at this time that first brought his work to global attention. In the early 1990s, he moved to London, from where he continued to respond to global social issues, notably his longitudinal project on the impact of HIV/AIDS. That photographic odyssey began in Africa, taking in eight countries and expanded to numerous other nations during the last twenty years. The concluding and ongoing chapter, Through Positive Eyes, is a collaborative project in which Mendel’s role shifted from photographer to enabler, handing over his camera to HIV-positive people. His first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa was published in 2001. Since then he has produced a number of photographic advocacy projects, working with charities and campaigning organizations including The Global Fund, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Terrene Higgins Trust, UNICEF and Concern Worldwide. Since 2007, Gideon has been occupied with Drowning World, an art and advocacy project about flooding that is his personal response to climate change. This work has been applauded for its unusual approaches to portraiture and the development of a variety of visual strategies and elements, including video, to deepen the impact of the endeavor. Amongst many accolades, he has won the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, six World Press Photo Awards, first prize in the Pictures of the Year competition, a POY Canon Photo Essayist Award, the Amnesty International Media Award for Photojournalism, he was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Prize 2015 for Drowning World, which more recently also won a Greenpeace Photo Award, a fact that I neglected to mention during the interview.

039 - Daniel Castro Garcia

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 12:42:00 GMT

Daniel Castro Garcia studied Spanish and Latin American Literature at University College London and after graduating went on to work in the UK film, commercial and music video industry where he still works as a freelance first assistant director. That’s how he pays the bills but for the past 5 years his real passion has been for photography. Having started out as a street photographer working on personal projects his work now focuses on social documentary and portraiture. In May 2015 Daniel started a photography project about the current European refugee crisis which has seen the greatest number of people forcibly displaced from their homes since the second world war. That project, in collaboration with his creative partner designer Thomas Saxby, has been self published as a book entitiled “Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016” which was shortlisted for the Mack First Book Award and also, more recently, for the paris photo aperture foundation first book award.

038 - Juno Calypso

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 07:37:00 GMT

Juno Calypso is a 2012 graduate of the BA Photography degree course at London College of Communication, where her degree show was awarded both the Hotshoe Portfolio Award and the Michael Wilson Photographic Prize. In 2013 The Independent noted Juno Calypso as the ‘One To Watch’, as have numerous other publications since. The Catlin Art Guide featured Juno as one of 40 of the most promising new artists in the UK, subsequently shortlisting her for the 2013 Catlin Art Prize, where she won the Visitor Vote Prize. In 2015 she also won the BJP International Photography Award. Her work is featured in the current issue of Foam magazine as one of 24 young artists shaping the future of photography. Juno has exhibited internationally with group shows in London, Miami and New York, and her work has been featured in The Sunday Times Magazine, Wonderland, Dazed & Confused, and The Huffington Post amongst many others. Let me, by way of an intro, read a brief artists statement by Juno: “I recently began working with self-portraiture, which led to the creation of a character named Joyce. Within elaborately staged large format photographs I draw upon personal experience to perform critical studies into modern rituals of beauty and seduction. Objects once perceived as radical, innovative, fun and nutritious – an electronic anti-wrinkle mask, computer equipment from the 1980s, baby oil, a tin of cold meat – have become joyless and oppressive. Joyce appears alone, consumed by artifice. Her glazed appearance acting as a mirror to the exhaustion felt whilst bearing the dead weight of constructed femininity.” So here to shed some light on and expand upon all that, is Juno.

037 - Peter Zelewski

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 08:24:00 GMT

Peter Zelewski is a London based portrait and documentary photographer. Born in Detroit, USA, he moved to London in the 1980s and studied graphic design and photography at the London College of Communication (LCC). Through his fascination with people and a love of the city, he was drawn to the streets of London to take photographs of its citizens, resulting in two award-winning projects People of Soho and Beautiful Strangers. He divides his time between graphic design, commercial photography commissions and his self-initiated portraiture projects. His work has been featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Evening Standard, La Repubblica and Leica Fotografie International (LFI). In 2015 he was awarded third prize in the prestigeous Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London for his image of Nyaeuth (above) and this year three images from his Twins project were selected for inclusion in the Royal Photographic Institute's International Print Exhibition. His first book People of London will be released by Hoxton Mini Press in October 2016.

036 - Jocelyn Bain-Hogg

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 08:27:00 GMT

After studying Documentary Photography at Newport Art College in Wales, Jocelyn Bain-Hogg began his career as a unit photographer on movie sets, shot publicity stills for the BBC and photographed fashion before returning to his documentary roots where he has largely remained ever since, working on long-term personal projects, editorial assignments and commercial commissions. He is the author of seven photobooks. To name but some of them, his first, The Firm, published in 2001, presented an astonishingly intimate view of London’s organised crime world, and won international acclaim. It was followed up a decade later by The Family, which was premiered as an exhibition at the Visa Pour L'Image festival in Perpignan in 2011 and was published as a photobook by Foto8. His second book, Idols + Believers, an intensive journey into the nature of fame and today’s celebrity culture, was published in 2006 with a touring exhibition shown in London, Paris, New York and Miami and the third, Pleasure Island, looked at the pursuit of pleasure, rock and roll and dance culture in Ibiza. He has got at least two, if not three new projects in the pipeline. In 2008 he was commissioned by Sky News to document the issues surrounding British youth and he is presently continuing this work for Sea Change, a major project started in 2013 documenting youth across Europe, involving an international roster of photographers for which he is photo-director. In addition to the continuing British Youth series, he is working on an innovative book project about his hometown, Tired of London, Tired of Life. Which is a collaboration with artist Paul Davis. Jocelyn is currently course leader on the B.A. photojournalism and documentary photography degree at the London College of Communication and is a member of the VII Photo Agency.

035 - Jane Hilton

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 07:29:00 GMT

Jane Hilton started out as a classical musician, graduating in 1984 with a degree in Music and Visual Art from Lancaster University. Her love of photography brought her to London, working as an assistant for numerous fashion and advertising photographers, before going it alone in 1988. Early work included both fashion and editorial alongside her documentary projects, which are her passion and the mainstay of her work today. Her first trip to Arizona in 1988 sparked an obsession for America and American culture which has endured for nearly 30 years and which has seen her spend much of her career undertaking long-term personal projects in the USA. She began by exploring Las Vegas's McDonald's drive-thru style wedding culture in her series Forever Starts Now and from there a road trip across the Nevada desert let her 350 miles away, where a roadside brothel outside Reno called 'Madam Kitty's Cathouse' caught her eye. This chance encounter became a two year project and resulted in a ten-part documentary series for the BBC, The Brothel / Love For Sale, as well as a series of exhibitions on desert landscapes, pimps and prostitutes. Inspired by a commission in 2006 to photograph a 17 year-old cowboy, Jeremiah Karsten, who travelled 4,000 miles on horseback from his native Alaska to Mexico, Jane set off on her own four year pilgrimage, criss crossing the cowboy states of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, New Mexico and Wyoming to capture America's 21st century cowboys which culminated in her 2010 book Dead Eagle Trail. For her most recent book Jane returned to the brothels of Nevada. Precious is a collection of intimate nude portraits of working girls from the only state in America where prostitution is legal. Jane's work is regularly published in The Sunday Times Magazine and The Telegraph Magazine.

034 - Chris Floyd

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 11:07:00 GMT

Chris Floyd is a British photographer and film maker. His work has appeared in some of the world’s most highly respected publications, including The New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar, GQ, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. He has shot advertising campaigns for British Airways, Apple, Sony and Philips and has been selected several times for the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and the annual publication, American Photography. The beginning of Chris’s career coincided with the so-called Britpop movement during the early and mid nineties when he found himself with the opportunity to cut his teeth photographing the biggest British bands of the day, starting with a bunch of unknown Mancunians who called themselves Oasis. In 2011 Chris published a project entitled ‘One Hundred And Forty Characters’. Over a period of a year he made contact with 140 people that he followed on Twitter and photographed each of them in his London studio. The idea for this came at a moment when he realised he had not spoken to any of his closest real life friends in over a month, yet he was communicating several times a week with people on Twitter that he had never met at all. The project received worldwide recognition and acclaim, with features about it on the BBC, Newsweek, The Guardian, Sunday Times, Elle, Esquire and many other publications and websites. Chris lives in England with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters.

033 - Chris Steele-Perkins

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 07:46:00 GMT

Magnum legend Chris Steele-Perkins was born in Burma in 1947 to a Burmese mother and an English father, who brought him back to England when he was 2 years old. He published his first photobook The Teds in 1979 and shortly after that joined Magnum photos after an invitation to apply from none other than Josef Koudelka. He subsequently travelled all over the world, covering many of the major global conflicts of the 80’s and 90’s in between working extensively in his home country, and producing a number of books of that work, along with those from Afghanistan and later from his wife’s native country of Japan. He has won, to name but a few awards, The Oscar Barnack Prize, The Robert Capa Gold Medal and a number of World Press awards, and all that despite the fact that he doesn’t really consider himself to be a photojournalist.

032 - Seamus Murphy

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:31:00 GMT

Irish photographer Seamus Murphy was born in England in 1959, grew up in Dublin, made his escape to the USA after college, where he lived in New York and San Francisco and now lives in London. He has over 30 years experience working as a documentary photographer all over the world and is the author of four books, including A Darkness Visible the result of 14 years shooting in Afghanistan. As mentioned earlier, he is the recipient of seven World Press Photo awards for his work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru and Ireland and received The World Understanding Award from Pictures of the Year in 2005 in the USA. The film he made on his Afghan work - also entitled A Darkness Visible - won the Liberty in Media Prize in 2011 and was nominated for an Emmy. He has worked with musician PJ Harvey on film and photography projects including their most recent collaboration The Hollow of the Hand. His latest book The Republic, a personal portrait of Ireland, was published in March 2016. And it was with The Republic that we started off.

031 - Max Pinckers

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 11:31:00 GMT

Max Pinckers was born in Belgium in 1988 and grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore. Although his dad was a photographer, he didn’t start shooting himself until 2006 when he returned to his native country to study documentary photography at the KASK school of art in Ghent, where he is currently a doctoral researcher. In 2015 he became a nominee of Magnum Photos. Not believing in the possibility of sheer objectivity or neutrality, Pinckers advocates a manifest subjective approach, which is made visible through the explicit use of theatrical lighting, stage directions or extras. Extensive research and diligent technical preparation are combined with improvisation to obtain lively, unexpected, critical, poetic and simultaneously documentary images. Since 2011 he has produced several documentary photo-series in Thailand, India, Japan and Kenya. Every series is turned into a carefully laid out book consisting of interwoven photographs, documents and texts.

030 - Daniel Regan

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:28:00 GMT

Daniel Regan has a degree in photography from the University of Brighton, an MA in photography form the London College of Communication and runs the website fragmentary.org in which he curates and collates the work of other photographers dealing with the subject of mental health. He also organises events and exhibitions exploring and encouraging debate on the benefits of art for those with experience of mental difficulties. Daniel is one of those people and nearly all of his work focusses, one way or another, on his own history of mental health problems, which, for him, began at the tender and difficult age of twelve.

029 - Tanya Habjouqa

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 06:35:00 GMT

Tanya Habjouqa is an award-winning photographer, journalist and educator whose practice links social documentary, collaborative portraiture and participant observation and whose principal interests include gender, representations of otherness, dispossession and human rights, with a particular concern for the ever-shifting sociopolitical dynamics in the Middle East. Tanya trained in Journalism and Anthropology and has an MA in Global Media with an emphasis on Middle East Politics from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She produces in-depth narratives that offer nuanced alternatives to mainstream media depictions of her subjects, exemplified by Occupied Pleasures, her project depicting the every day lives of Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. The work received support from the Magnum Foundation, achieved a second place World Press Photo award in the Daily Life category in 2014 and was published as a book Occupied Pleasures by FotoEvidence in 2015. It was critically acclaimed and was judged by numerous critics as one of the best photo books of that year. Tanya's work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She is a founding member of Rawiya, the first all-female photography collective from the Middle East, which, as Tanya mentions in the interview, may not remain all-female forever. STOP PRESS: It has just been announced that Tanya has joined photo agency Noor Images as one of two new nominees. Many congratulations!

028 - Photo London 2016 Special

Mon, 23 May 2016 15:25:00 GMT

A personal, disorganised and decidedly non-comprehensive flavour of the recent photographic shenanigans here in London over the past few days at the second annual Photo London trade fair and at Offprint London, one of a number of satellite events organised around it.

027 - Edward Thompson

Wed, 18 May 2016 09:14:00 GMT

Ed Thompson is a British photographer, artist and lecturer. His own photographic work has focused on various subjects over the years from environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures and the consequences of war and his documentary photo-essays have been published in international magazines including National Geographic, Newsweek Japan and the Guardian Weekend Magazine. In 2007 he studied the Master's Degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication for which he received a first class distinction. In the spring of 2013 Ed started Punktum which evolved into The School of Punktum where leading photographers and lecturers from various London Universities teach month long courses on documentary photography to intimate 10 person classed from as little as £100. There are also free portfolio reviews. It’s a brilliant idea and Ed explains how it came about in the interview.

026 - Laura El Tantawy

Wed, 04 May 2016 09:05:00 GMT

Laura El-Tantawy was born in Worcestershire, England to Egyptian parents and spent her childhood and early years in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the USA. Her photography, perhaps inevitably, is inspired by questions on her identity - exploring social and environmental issues pertaining to her background. In 2002, she started her career as a newspaper photographer in the USA with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and then the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. In 2006, she went freelance to pursue personal projects. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia with dual degrees in journalism and political science. She also has an MA in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminster as well as a Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Last year, in 2015, Laura published her first photobook, In The Shadow Of The Pyramids, a first person account exploring memory and identity which began in 2005 when she returned to Egypt out of a desire to reconnect with a country she felt she no longer knew in order to explore the essence of Egyptian identity in the hope of coming to terms with her own. The book was critically acclaimed and led to Laura being nominated for the 2016 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize for which she is one of the four finalists. All 500 copies have sold out but you can still get yourself one the limited special editions, available from her website (link below) at £250. Not cheap, but an investment! In episode 26, Laura discusses: Formative experiences - Saudi & USA; discovering photography; a training in newspapers; having a day job; the origins of In The Shadow Of The Pyramids; a secret revealed: Cloudy mode!; visual literacy among the general population and the succes of the book

025 - Edmund Clark

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 15:43:00 GMT

Edmund Clark is an award-winning artist interested in linking history, politics and representation. His work traces ideas of shared humanity, otherness and unseen experience through landscape, architecture and the documents, possessions and environments of subjects of political tension. The series Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out, Letters to Omar and Control Order House, all of which have been published as books, engage with state censorship to explore the hidden experiences and spaces of control and incarceration in the ‘Global War on Terror’, as does Edmunds latest book, co-authored by counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition. His other book, The Mountains of Majeed, reflects on the end of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Edmund’s work has been acquired for national and international collections including, in Britain, The National Portrait Gallery, The National Media Museum and The Imperial War Museum, London where he is currently preparing for the opening of a major, year-long exhibition, which he talks briefly about in the interview. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet on the theme of Power and being twice nominated for the Deutsche Borse Prize. He teaches postgraduate students at the University of the Arts London, contributes regularly to international conferences and symposia, and is actively engaged with education through lectures, talks, workshops and portfolio reviews.

024 - Sophie Ebrard

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 08:14:00 GMT

Sophie Ebrard was pursuing a very successful career in advertising until 6 years ago when, creatively frustrated, she decided to leave it all behind, start calling herself a photographer and pursue her passion for taking pictures. She happily admits that she barely knew anything about photography at that stage but she set about learning the ropes and building a portfolio and in the relatively short time since then she has found considerable success as a commercial photographer, having been commissioned to shoot numerous high-profile advertising campaigns. Simultaneously, she has worked on her own personal projects, the best known of which is undoubtedly “It’s Just Love”, whereby over a four year period, she explored the world of adult entertainment, shooting the action both in front of the camera and behind the scenes on porn film sets all over the world. The work has been widely published and was featured at the Unseen festival in Amsterdam in 2015, as a solo exhibition that - for reasons she explains in the interview - was held in Sophie’s own house. In Episode 24, Sophie discusses: the transition from advertising; her film-based working procees; swinger party etiquette; finding the beauty in the every day and the 'It’s Just Love' project.

023 - Murray Ballard

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 10:46:00 GMT

Murray Ballard embarked on a degree in furniture and product design before realising that learning about the chemical properties of plastic held little interest for him. At this point he jumped ship and switched to an art foundation course where he duly discovered something much more exciting. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a degree in Photography. The following year he was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 08 – the annual showcase of work by the ‘most promising recent graduates’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. In 2011 the British Journal of Photography recognised him as an ‘emerging photographer of note’, following his debut solo show at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, The Prospect of Immortality, which took as its subject the strange, marginal world of cryonics: the process of storing a dead body by freezing it until science has advanced to such a degree that it is able to bring that person back to life. Immediately after leaving college, Murray got the job of assisting Magnum photographer Mark Power, a role which he stayed in until quite recently. During those past ten years he has taken on his own commissions, worked on his own personal projects and continued his cryonics story - which he had first began while he still studying after coming across a curious news story in The Guardian. Exactly a decade later the book of that project has just been published by GOST books. Murray's photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, FT Weekend, GEO, GQ, The Guardian, The Independent and Wired. In episode 23, Murray Discusses: Early times doing "bad Jeff Walls"; a turning point - Alec Soth, Sleeping By The Mississippi; early influence: sci-fi movies; learing about "picture making" with Mark Power; the unlikely origins of his cryonics project; the Prospect of Immortality; working with GOST on the book

022 - Jack Latham

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 12:24:00 GMT

Jack Latham is a freelance photographer, born and raised in Wales, now living and working in Brighton on the south coast of England. He graduated from the Documentary Photography course at Newport University, South Wales in 2012. His work is presented in a mixture of large format photography and digital film making and has been realised in several self-published books. Jack has exhibited internationally and in December 2015, was the recipient of the Bar Tur Photobook Award for his recent work titled 'Sugar Paper Theories'. In addition to his own photographic practice, Jack co-curates the Miniclick event series in Brighton. He is also a founding member and continuing contributor to the Welsh photography collective A Fine Beginning which has been exhibiting across the UK through out 2013-2016. Jack also runs an in house printing company called DiveBar.

021 - Kate Peters

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 11:48:00 GMT

Inspired by a cool photography teacher and her cupboard full of photobooks, Kate Peters started taking pictures at school and has never really wanted to do anything else since. Whilst doing a photography degree at Falmouth College of Arts she responded to a notice offering work experience with Nadav Kander, which she got and that led to what I guess would be some people’s idea of a dream apprenticeship - a full time assisting job with Nadav that lasted four years. After striking out on her own she quite quickly established herself as an editorial portrait photographer, a profile which was helped when in 2012 she was commissioned by the Guardian Weekend Magazine to photograph 32 of the UK’s Olympic hopefulls, which became a cover story. Her portrait of Julian Assange also ended up on the cover of Time. She has also worked on a number of personal projects including Yes Mistress, a portrait series about the world of the dominatrix and Cam Girls, which features images of sex workers taken from the computer screen, both of which she discusses in the interview. She has won a number of accolades including the Vic Odden award in 2013 and the Freshfields Prize at the Renaissance Awards and a selection of her portraits form part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait gallery in London. In episode 21, Kate discusses: Concerns brought on by motherhood; assisting Nadav Kander; not being in a hurry; the Yes Mistress project; CamGirls; editorial commissions - her process; shooting women & shooting film; book recomendatations; fear of the unknown

020 - Chloe Dewe Mathews

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 12:16:00 GMT

After taking a degree in Fine Art at Oxford University, Chloe Dewe Mathews worked in the film industry for four years before making the switch to photography. In a relatively short period of time she established herself as a one of those young talents to watch. Her subject matter has been diverse, from holidaying Hasidic Jews at the Welsh seaside to Uzbek gravediggers on the Caspian coast. In 2010 she spent nine months travelling extensively around China and the Caspian Sea region of central Asia where she worked on stories on the indiginous Uighur population of Xingiang in western China, the ecological disaster that is the Aral sea, and the rapidly developing, oil rich country of Azerbaijhan. More recently Chloe was commissioned by her alma mater, Ruskin College of Art, Oxford, to produce a body of work that would mark the centenary of the First World War. The resulting project, Shot At Dawn, explores the sombre, often overlooked and sometimes controversial subject of the one thousand British, French and Belgian soldiers who were executed by firing squad for cowardice or dissertion between 1914 and 1918. The images she made, of the exact locations of some of these executions, as well as being extensively exhibited, became Chloe's first book, published by Ivorypress. In 2014 she was awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University's Peabody Museum which will eventually result in a book of her work from the Caspian Sea. Chloe has also been awarded the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award, the Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award by the Magenta Foundation and the BJP International Photography Award. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. In episode 020, Chloe discusses: From fine art to the movie business; the transition to photography; a trip through central Asia; being self critical; photo book recommendation: Sequester by Awoiska Van Der Molen; her ongoing project about the River Thames

019 - Lydia Goldblatt

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 11:00:00 GMT

Lydia Goldblatt trained at the London College of Communications, receiving a Masters Degree in Photography with Distinction in 2006. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, with group and solo shows in the UK, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Greece, China and Malaysia. Her long term project, Still Here, which she worked on over a three year period, featured images of her parents and focussed mainly on the subject of her elderly father’s mortality, stemming, as she puts it, "from a desire to address the inevitable changes wrought by his approaching death." It was published as a book by Hatje Canz in 2013 and has also been shown in various international exhibitions. If you’re not familiar with the work, you can see a selection of images from the series at lydiagoldblatt.com. Alongside such personal projects, her editorial work has appeared in a variety of magazines including those of the Guardian, Sunday Times and Telegraph newspapers. In 2010 she was nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize, and in 2011 was awarded the Fundacion Botin Residency Award with Paul Graham. More recently she was the recipient of the Magenta Flash Forward Award and International Jewish Artist of the Year award and she is currently on a one year artist residency in London, where she lives.

018 - Niall McDiarmid

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 10:02:00 GMT

Niall McDiarmid has been a jobbing commercial and editorial photographer for twenty five years but he is best known for his distinctive, perhaps unique, street portraits which feature in his two self-published books, Crossing Paths, which came out in 2013 and for which Niall travelled across Britain, visiting over 120 towns, covering 20,000 miles and shooting more than 800 portraits of some of the people he met on his travels, and the follow-up, Via Vauxhall, for which he stayed closer to home, focussing on the residents and commuters passing through the tube and bus station in one small corner of London, the rapidly developing area of Vauxhall. That came out in 2014. Both books are sold out but you can see examples of the work on Niall's website. In episode 018, Niall discusses: The origins of the Crossing Paths project; using social media and overcoming shyness; having something that people recognise; finding an audience beyond photoland; use of colour The Via Vauxhall book project.

017 - Matt Stuart

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 11:19:00 GMT

Matt Stuart shoots people. As one of the UK’s most prolific and highly respected street photographers, he has spent nearly two decades obsessively pounding the streets of London, where he lives, in pursuit of those elusive, magical moments when all the different elements of a good street photo - colour, composition, humour, happenstance - merge together for that split second, where Matt is poised and ready to capture the moment- and sometimes anticipate it - with his trusty Leica. His first book - All That Life Can Afford - containing many of the highlights from these trips, is published in February 2016 under his own imprint, Plague Press. And you can order a copy direct from his website via the link below. If you want to jump on the end of year best-of bandwagon (and why wouldn't you?) please do nominate your favourite photobook of 2015, in the comment section of the website. Happy holidays!

016 - Harry Borden (pt.2)

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 11:55:00 GMT

So here's part two of the Harry Borden interview. If you haven't listened to part one you should probably go and do that first! I think I may have lost a few minutes of chat during this bit because at one point my recorder ran out of batteries and being incredibly professional I didn't have any replacements, so after several minutes of unsuccessfully raiding all of somebody elses remote controls for AAs that would work we had to take a quick stroll to the corner shop. So, in case it's a little unclear, the book that we're referring to about 12 minutes in is Harry's long term project on Holocaust survivors which you can see more of on his website (link below), with a brief explanation of the genesis of the project.

In episode 16, Harry discusses: being diligent; getting started on the NME & Observer; early World Press Photo success; his forthcoming book "Survivor”; his most memorably horrible shoot; not knowing when to quit; his single parent fathers project and doing things for the intrinsic pleasure of it.

015 - Harry Borden (pt.1)

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 13:07:00 GMT

Over the course of a 30 year career as one of the UK’s most prominent and prolific portrait photographers, Harry Borden has photographed absolutely everybody. He started out shooting bands and musicians for the New Musical Express, where he quickly made a name for himself, before then establishing himself as a regular contributor to the Observer Newspaper and its magazine. It wasn’t long before he would cement his burgeoning reputation by winning second prize in the portrait category of the World Press Photo awards on two consecutive years, at a stage in his career where he barely knew what the World Press Photo awards were. Since then his work has featured in the weekend magazines of just about every national newspaper in Britain as well as many of the world’s most high profile magazines. Harry has more photographs in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery than an other photographer of his generation and in 2014 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the royal photographic society. As well as his editorial and commercial work he has also produced a number of personal projects, the latest of which is a portrait series of holocaust survivors which will be published in 2017 by Octopus. He talks a little about the project in part 2, which will be next week. It was a real pleasure to talk to Harry. He is an absolute gentleman and the reason this is a two-parter is that we chatted for well over two hours and I think we could’ve gone on all day. When I came to listen to the interview, I realised I couldn’t possibly edit it down to a listener-friendly hour or so, because I wanted to use nearly all of it. So, rather than put out one stupidly long episode, I thought I would run it over two weeks, and that’s what I’m doing. Here’s part one and at the beginning of the conversation we were talking about a shoot Harry had recently done with the dancer, Darcy Bussell…

014 - Mimi Mollica

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 13:20:00 GMT

Mimi Mollica grew up in Sicily where he inherited his father’s passion for documentary photography at the tender age of 8. By the time he was 20 he’d made his escape to London, where he began his career assisting the esteemed architectural photographer Helene Binet.

He dropped out of a photography degree to pursue a freelance career and has since covered assignments all over the world, for a wide range of internationally recognised publications. As well as juggling the demands of freelance assignments with his own long-term personal projects, he also finds time for some teaching and has more recently founded Offspring Photomeet, an organisation which provides a kind of mentoring service for photographers. In Mimi’s own words it’s “a kind of crossbreed between a networking event and portfolio review and a tiny, creative festival of photography that involves lectures, talks, debates”.

I didn’t know Mimi and it was great to meet him. He’s a very articulate, engaging and energetic presence with an infectious passion for photography, and indeed life, and as such he’s the sort of bloke who comes across as real force for good in the world.

We began by talking a bit about the photographic coverage of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, and I think we both felt that perhaps we hadn’t expressed ourselves as well as we might’ve liked or that maybe the discussion was a bit cursory, which was entirely my fault, I probably moved things on prematurely. But anyhow, we did at least throw a few issues up in the air that are certainly worthy of consideration.

013 - Maja Daniels

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 13:27:00 GMT

Maja Daniels, grew up in Sweden where she developed an early interest in journalism and then photography. in her late teens she upped sticks and moved to Paris, ostensibly to learn French, where she continued her photographic studies at the Paris Photographic Institute, before then taking a degree in Sociology. At the same time she assisted the fashion and portrait photographer Peter Lindbergh who she continued to work with and learn from for several years.

Her work has included in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2011 and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She participated in the 2012 Joop Swart Masterclass organised by World Press Photo and she won second prize in the 2012 Sony World Photography Awards. She was also selected as one of the 2012 and 2011 Magenta Foundations Flash Forward Emerging Photographers and shortlisted for the 2010 PhotoVisura Grant for an outstanding personal photography project Her work has been exhibited internationally.

She talks in the interview about her three main personal projects: The first was Into Oblivion, whereby for three years she investigated the politics of ageing in the western world with a focus on care policies for people with Alzheimer’s disease, photographing on a ward for Alzheimer’s patients in a Paris hospital. Her second project, for which she has won numerous prizes and which has been widely published, was Monette and Mady, her ongoing study of inseperable identical Parisian twins who she has been documenting and collaborating with for the past five years. Finally she talks a little about her most personal project, which she is currently working on: River Valley Vernacular, which has taken her back to her native Sweden to document life in a small community - the river valley of the title - where her grandparents come from and where the population speak and are attempting to keep alive the ancient language of Elfdalian, which has strong links to old Norse, the language once spoken by the Vikings.

012 - Abbie Trayler Smith

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 11:27:00 GMT

Abbie Trayler Smith was born and raised in Wales. Her career in photography began in London where she found herself studying for a degree in law, before realising that a legal career in the UK would almost certainly look nothing like it did on Ally McBeal. At around the same time she discovered and fell in love with documentary photography and so that is what she decided to pursue.
Her first professional experience was as a news photographer for the Daily Telegraph, where she spent eight years covering world events such as the Darfur conflict, the Iraq war and the Asian tsunami, before deciding to go freelance in 2007. She now works for a wide variety of clients including Time, The Sunday Times, The Independent Review, Marie-Claire, Tatler, Monocle, Vice and a number of NGOs. In 2008 she joined photo agency Panos Pictures.
In 2014, she won a second prize in the World Press Photo awards for a portrait from her long-term personal project The Big ‘O’, which focusses on what has become one of the huge global health issues of our times, that of childhood obesity. The project, which is still ongoing, also won the 2014 Ideastap Magnum Photographic Award.
In episode 012, Abbie discusses: Multi-media; seeing Philip Jones Griffiths' contact sheets; why she eschewed a legal career; her eight years with the Daily Telegraph; The Big 'O' project and the Still Human, Still Here project.

011 - Olivia Arthur

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 16:34:00 GMT

Magnum photographer, Olivia Arthur was born in London and grew up in the UK. She studied mathematics at Oxford University, where she decided to become a photographer and she went on to study photojournalism at the London College of Printing before then moving to India with her family, where she was based for two and a half years and where she learnt to take pictures.
In 2006 she left for Italy to take up a one-year residency with Fabrica, the organisation funded by Benetton, during which time she began working on a series about women and the East-West cultural divide: The Middle Distance. This work has taken her to Turkey, the border between Europe and Asia, Iran and then Saudi Arabia, where she went to teach a workshop for women and where she made the pictures for her first book Jeddah Diaries - about the lives of some of the young women she got to know there - which was was published in 2012.
During all this she won the Inge Morath Award which prompted her to apply for Magnum photos, she was accepted as a nominee and became a full member five years later.
Her second book, Stranger is a journey into Dubai seen through the eyes of the survivor of a shipwreck.
In 2010, with her husband, Philipp Ebeling, who is also a photographer, she co-founded Fishbar, a gallery / photo bookshop / photography space and photobook imprint.
In episode 011 Olivia discusses: A Mathematics degree at Oxford to Photojournalism at LCP; learning to take pictures in India; a residency in Italy with Fabrica; the Middle Distance project; Saudi Arabia: Jeddah Diaries; Magnum Photos; Parenthood and Fishbar.

010 - Peter Dench

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 18:35:00 GMT

Peter Dench has 20 years of experience as an editorial photographer, shooting documentary features, portraits, and advertising jobs, as well as turning his hand to video, writing, podcasting and being co-creative director of the White Cloth Gallery in Leeds, which he co-founded. Although he has worked in over 60 different countries, he is perhaps best known for documenting various aspects of English life in his own inimitable, irreverent style.
He has won numerous awards and has published 4 books, 3 of them in the past 12 months: England Uncensored, A&E: Alcohol and England, The British Abroad and, most recently, Dench Does Dallas, in which he sought to make a break from the work on England by turning his attention to the USA.

009 - Adam Hinton

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 15:30:00 GMT

Adam Hinton is a photographer who for 25 years has managed to combine a successful career shooting advertising campaigns for a diverse range of clients including huge global brands such as Adidas, Nike, BMW and Sony, with his own personal documentary projects. Although he always had his eye on an advertising career, he began his photographic odyssey as a photojournalist when in the early 90’s his interest in politics took him to the Ukraine in the wake of the collapse of the soviet union, where he focussed his attention on the coal mining community in Donetsk. Since then he has travelled all over the world including to Gaza, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Venezuela, Brazil and all over Africa. Much of his personal work over the past decade has focused on the slums of the developing world, and it was as part of that project that, in 2013, he ended up in El Salvador where he ended up in a prison shooting portraits of members of the notorious Mara Salvatucha gang, the results of which have now been published in a book, MS-13 published by Paul Belford (link below). In episode 009 Adam discusses: the 'MS-13' gang project; getting his first SLR aged 12; adifficult childhood; the need for security; a change of direction; the pleasures of advertising photography and the advantages of getting stabbed aged 15.

008 - Guy Martin

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 07:49:00 GMT

Guy Martin’s career began almost exactly ten years ago when in 2006 he graduated from the legendary University of Wales BA course in documentary photography with a first class degree. Since then, he has establishing himself as a successful editorial photographer and his work has appeared in a wide selection of some of the world’s most high profile magazines.
As well as editorial commissions, he has also worked consistently on long-term personal projects - which, as he explains, are hugely important to him - and his latest The City of Dreams, shot in Turkey where he is now based, has been extensively published and exhibited. It’s a clever juxtaposition of two disparate elements involving Turkish soap operas and work from various protests. You can see it on his website (link below) and that is the project he is referrring to in the latter half of the podcast.
During 2011 guy covered the tumultous political upheaval in the middle east and North Africa, which we have subsequently come to refer to as the Arab Spring. He photographed the revolution in Egypt and then, in April of that year, the civil war in Libya. It was there in the besieged city of Misrata that tragedy struck and Guy came very close to losing his life. He and fellow photographers Chris Hondras and Tim Hetherington, two of the most experienced and respected photojournalists of their generation, were caught in heavy fighting and a motar exploded right next to them. Chris and Tim were both killed - a huge and shocking loss which I think is probably still being felt in the photographic community not to mention among those that knew and loved them - but Guy, who was badly injured, survived and got home to England to begin his rehabilitation, which he threw himself into with single-minded determination.
In episode 008, Guy discusses: Relationship with Huck magazine; staying with it until it gets awkward; print being alive and well; the importance of personal projects; Turkey project - The City of Dreams; studying at Newport; tragedy in Misrata

007 - Stuart Freedman

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 16:32:00 GMT

Stuart Freedman was born in London and has been a photographer since 1991. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Life, Geo, Time, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Sunday Times Magazine and Paris Match. He has covered stories all over the world, from Albania to Afghanistan and from former Yugoslavia to Haiti and Sierra Leone.

His work has been recognised in many awards, from amongst others, Amnesty International (twice), Pictures of the Year, The World Sports Photo Award, The Royal Photographic Society and UNICEF. In 1998 he was selected for the World Press Masterclass and the following year for the Agfa Young Photojournalist of the Year.

His work has been exhibited widely. Solo shows include Visa Pour L’Image at Perpignan, The Scoop Festival in Anjou, The Leica Gallery in Germany, The Foire du Livre (Brussels), The Museum of Ethnography (Stockholm), The Association and the Spitz Galleries in London. His work on HIV/AIDS in Rwanda and from post-conflict South of Lebanon have toured extensively internationally.

He continues to write and photograph for a variety of editorial and commercial clients and is a member of Panos Pictures in London. His first book, The Palaces of Memory, about the coffee houses of India, has just been published by Dewi Lewis (link below).

In episode 007, Stuart discusses: Photography magazine as an early influence; being "appalling" to begin with; wanting to be a writer; Sierra Leone; a love/hate relationship with India; the Palaces of Memory; having to be a brand; revenue streams and fashions.

006 - Laura Pannack

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 18:31:00 GMT

Laura Pannack has established herself in the past six or seven years as a very original voice in the field of portrait photography. She has been extensively exhibited and published in the UK and Internationally, with her work having been shown at the National Portrait Gallery and the Houses of Parliament, among other venues. She has won numerous awards, including a first prize in the World Press Awards and the 2012 Vic Odden Award.
To quote from the blurb on her own website: 'Laura is driven by research led self-initiated projects. In her own words, she does all she can “to understand the lives of those captured, and to present them creatively”. She is a firm believer that “time, trust and understanding is the key to portraying subjects truthfully”, and as such, many of her projects develop over several years. Her particular approach allows a genuine connection to exist between sitter and photographer, which in turn elucidates the intimacy of these very human exchanges. Her images aim to suggest the shared ideas and experiences that are entwined in each frame that she shoots.'
In episode 006, Laura discusses: Feeling unproductive; early memories of having a photographer dad; trust; asking inappropriate questions; human vulnerability; the dilemma of deciding when to quit and remaining dissatisfied.

005 - Kalpesh Lathigra

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 13:43:00 GMT

Kalpesh Lathigra was born and bred in London, England. He studied photojournalism at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication), before being awarded what was then a much sought-after traineeship with the Independent Newspaper, which at that time was renowned for a commitment to using excellent photography in a way that many national newspapers in the UK never really had in the past. Kalpesh went on to have a successful freelance career as a newspaper and magazine photograper, shooting features and portraits for most of the major British broadsheets and their weekend magazines and in 2000 he won a first prize (Arts, Singles) in the World Press Awards. A few years later he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship for his long-term project about the lives of widows in India: Brides of Krishna. He is still a busy, jobbing editorial photographer, but, alongside that role, he has also developed his own personal practice in which he has attempted to straddle the invisible divide between editorial, documentary photographer and a more authored, artistic sensibility - a state of affairs that we spend much of the interview mulling over. His first book, 'Lost In The Wilderness', which he funded with a Kickstarter campaign, will be published later this Autumn and is the result of 5 years work documenting the native American Lakota Sioux community of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, USA. (Check links below for updates.) In Episode 005 Kalpesh discusses: Use of the label 'artist'; book project - 'Lost In The Wilderness'; why working is good for the soul; a friendship with Ralph Fiennes; changing his approach to the story; the fight against cliche, the World Press controversy and he danger of cliques

004 - Antonio Olmos

Tue, 22 Sep 2015 14:20:00 GMT

Antonio Zazueta Olmos was born in Mexicali, Mexico. At the age of 12 his family moved to Fresno, California where he spent his formative years. He went on to take a degree in Photojournalism at California State University before moving to the other side of the country to spend 3 happy years on the Miami Herald. Since then, as a passionate and socially conscious photojournalist, working on issues concerning human rights, the environment and conflict, he has travelled all over the world, including The Americas, The Middle East and Africa. Twenty years ago he arrived in London for a short visit, started getting commissioned immediately and never left. He works regularly for the Guardian and Observer Newspapers. On January 1st 2011, he began working on what was to become his first book, The Landscape of Murder, in which he methodically documented the sites of all 210 murders that took place in London over a 2 year period. In Episode 004, Antonio discusses: Formative years in Fresno, California; A love of learning; Happy days on the Miami Herald; Returning to Mexico for the Black Star agency; News and wire photography; Shooting portraits; and The Landscape of Murder project

003 - Vanessa Winship

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:46:00 GMT

Vanessa Winship has spent the past two decades working on long-term documentary projects, predominantly in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and surrounding territories of Turkey and the countries surrounding the Black Sea, which provided the material for her first book, Schwarzes Meer (Black Sea). She went on to live for five years in Istanbul, Turkey, where she produced a second book: Sweet Nothings: The Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia. She has exhibited her work all over the world and has been awarded numerous honours including two first prize World Press Awards, the Sony Photographer of the Year Award, The Godfrey Argent Award and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2011, for which she proposed an 'American odyssey'. Her subsequent journeys in the USA resulted in another highly acclaimed book: She Dances On Jackson. In 2014 she had her first retrospective exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE gallery in Madrid, Spain.

002 - George Georgiou

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:44:00 GMT

George Georgiou who is of Greek Cypriot descent, was born and bred in London, England. He has spent most of the past two decades living and photographing extensively in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Turkey, where he lived in Istanbul for five years and which was the subject of his first book: Fault Lines/Turkey/East/West. He describes his work as having "focused on transition and identity and how people negotiate the space they find themselves in." On returning to London in 2008, he started work on the project which became his most recent book, Last Stop, an exploration of his home town photographed entirely through the windows of the city's double decker buses. George has exhibited all over the world, including MOMA in New York as part of the 2013 new photography show. Awards include two World Press Photo prizes in 2003 and 2005, The British Journal of Photography project prize 2010, Pictures of the Year International first prize for Istanbul Bombs in 2004 and a Nikon Press Award UK for photo essay 2000. In episode 002 George discusses: Getting 'ungraded' ("worse than an F") in his photography A' level; an early introduction to celebrity and glamour photography; experiences during the Kosovo conflict and Serbia; moving from B&W film to colour digital; whether he has '1000 true fans'; and funding a photo book through Kickstarter

001 - Ian Teh

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:43:00 GMT

Ian Teh has spent the past two decades working extensively in China on long term documentary projects. He has published three monographs, Undercurrents (2008), Traces (2011) and Confluence (2014), which was shot in Malaysia, where he is currently based. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and his work is featured in the permanent collections of a number of major museums. He has received several honours, including the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography and the Emergency Fund from the Magnum Foundation. In 2013 he was elected by the Open Society Foundations to exhibit in New York at the Moving Walls Exhibition. In 2010, the acclaimed literary magazine Granta published a 10-year retrospective of his work in China. Here he discusses what he learnt from using his dad's camera; his early love of B&W and why he switched to colour; his formative experiences in Hong Kong and elsewhere; 'photographic grammar' and his abiding obsession with process; and how to shoot an entire photo book in 3 weeks.

A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers (complete member-only archive)

165 - Nick Hannes

231 - Fotografia Europea 2024 Special

230 - Julia Kochetova

229 - Michael Ackerman

228 - Valerie Belin

227 - Linda Troeller

226 - Nicole Tung

225 - Mitch Epstein

224 - Edward Burtynsky

223 - Lorenzo Castore

222 - Natalie Keyssar

221 - Richard Kalvar

220 - Year in Review 2023

219 - Leonard Pongo

218 - Paris Photo 2023 Special

217 - Max Pam

216 - Corinne Dufka

215 - Luca Locatelli

214 - The 1 Million Downloads Episode

213 - Ian Berry

211 - Yelena Yemchuk

210 - Moises Saman

208 - Curran Hatleberg

207 - Bertrand Meunier

206 - Chico Review 2023 Special

205 - Photo London 2023 Special

204 - Ivor Prickett

203 - Stacy Kranitz

202 - Igor Posner

201 - Antoine D'agata

200 - Emma Hardy

199 - Nick Brandt

198 - Gregory Crewdson

197 - Martin Parr (#2)

195 - Aaron Schuman

194 - The Year In Review 2022

193 - Paddy Summerfield

192 - Stephen Shore

191 - Anastasia Samoylova

190 - BoP Bristol 2022 Special

189 - Ben Brody

188 - Kavi Pujara

187 - Bryan Schutmaat

186 - Sam Jones

184 - Joanne Coates

183 - Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022 Special

182 - Greg Williams

181 - Lewis Bush

180 - Pradip Malde

179 - Photo London 2022 Special

178 - Chico Review 2022 Special (pt.2)

177 - Chico Review 2022 Special (pt.1)

176 - Alba Zari

175 - Patrick Brown

174 - Jem Southam

173 - Eva Voutsaki

172 - Peter Fraser

171 - Mimi Plumb

170 - Robert Gumpert

169 - Alison McCauley

168 - The Year In Review 2021

167 - Adam Ferguson

166 - Anna Fox

164 - Paul Reas

163 - Jonas Bendiksen

162 - Naomi Harris

161 - Photo London 2021 Special

160 - Tom Wood

159 - Hannah Reyes Morales

158 - Kirsty Mackay

157 - Igor Posner and Ben Brody

156 - Lottie Davies

155 - Matthew Genitempo and Bryan Schutmaat

154 - Craig Easton

152 - Christian Patterson

151 - Tania Franco Klein

150 - Alejandro Cartagena

149 - Paul Graham

148 - David Yarrow