186 - Sam Jones
1h 18m
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A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers
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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, Until The Wheels Fall Off.
Referenced:
- Neil Blender
- Gordon & Smith
- Mark Boster
- Hugh Grant
- Steve Martin
- Laird Hamilton
- Robert Downey Jr.
- Tom Cruise
- Dax Sheppard
- Kristen Bell
- Tony Hawk
- Rodney Mullen
Website | Instagram | Off Camera | Documentaries
“Just like if you’re a kid and you didn’t grow up with a swimming pool in your back yard you’re gonna figure out a way to get invited to go swimming at your friend’s house. And so when I get an idea and I want to see it through, I don’t see the obstacles as things that will stop me, I just seem them as necessary parts of the process.”
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More episodes from A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers
231 - Fotografia Europea 2024 Special
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- Arko Datto Website | Instagram
- Yvonne Venegas Website | Instagram
- Tim Clark
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Referenced:
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Festival: Website | Instagram / Collezione Maramotti: Website | Instagram
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- For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here.
230 - Julia Kochetova
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.
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- Her documentary film project See You Later.
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Referenced:
- Oleksandr Komiakhov
- Daria Kolomiec
Website | Instagram
“I’m really grateful that our story is being told by Ukrainian photographers, but it never was about career ambition. We Ukrainian storytellers were never in the position that we chose to become war photographers. I keep saying I’m not a war photographer. I’m photographing war because this is what’s happening in my country. I have zero wish to photograph any other wars. I’m doing this because this is my war. That’s the only accurate skill I have.”
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- For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here.
229 - Michael Ackerman
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, includingEnd 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:
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- 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:
- Teru Kuwayama
- Sylvia Plachy
- Lorenzo Castore
- Anders Petersen
- Robert Frank
- Masao Yamamoto
- Boris Mikhailov
- Jem Cohen
Website | Instagram
“For me photography is always a negotiation between confrontation and avoidance. And I think my pictures show that. I think my pictures are very intimate and they do get close to something and they are an attempt at getting close, but there’s also a lot of fear in them I see, because I know it in myself, and a lot of solitude.”
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228 - Valerie Belin
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, atouring 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:
- Carl Andre
- Robert Morris
- Tony Smith (sculptor)
- Richard Serra
Website | Instagram
“I think it’s still true to say I’m very close to my medium and to the hybridation, because if you think of it what is photography today when with the same camera you can make videos, you can make whatever you want? I think we are in a time when you always have a kind of superimposition in your mind, you have several channels on all the time in your mind and maybe my pictures are showing that way of thinking or way of living.”
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227 - Linda Troeller
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:
- Lucien Clergue
- Eikoh Hosoe
- George Tice
- Judy Dater
- Imogen Cunningham
- Jack Welpott
- Robert Heinecken
- Lee Friedlander
- Melissa Shook
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.”
- Become a full tier 1 member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of previous episodes for £5 per month.
- For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here.