A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

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.

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.

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!

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.