A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

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.”

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…”

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:

• Nan Goldin
• Richard Billingham
• Nick Waplington
• Vivian Maier
• 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• Stuart Smith
• Stephen Ledger-Lomas
• Niall Sweeney

Website | Instagram

“When things line up, when life or the universe says ‘I’ve got something I can show you. Are you ready? ARE you ready?’ And you might be ready, and you might catch this thing that is shown to you. And that’s incredibly beautiful. And the times that that has happened I was very aware of it. Like, my whole body started fizzing.”

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
• His level of optimism about climate change

Referenced:

• Martin McDonagh
• Richard Avedon
• Irving Penn
• Arnold Newman
• Greta Thunberg

Website | Instagram

“Every project I go into I have no bloody clue whether it’s gonna work. But, that is part of the buzz, by which I mean I like to go into each project excited and scared shitless. I find that challenge to be incredibly stimulating.”

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 discusses, among other things:

• The three phases of his creative process
• Why he chose B&W for Eveningside
• His transition from film to digital
• The abiding themes in his work
• How every artist has one story to tell
• Falling in love with photography from day one
• His love of movies
• The significance of nudity in his work
• Allowing for ‘a certain kind of unexpected beauty and mystery’ to come out of the process
• Windows
• Never being quite satisfied with the results
• The relationship between true beauty and sadness
• The act of making a picture being an act of seperation from the world
• The way in which the subjects of his work always seem disconnected and alone…
• And how that references the act of making the picture.

Referenced

• The Night of the Hunter
• The Last Picture Show
• Mank
• Roma
• Rick Sands
• Laurie Simmonds

Gallery | Instagram

“I’ve said many times, I feel like every artist has one story to tell and that central story is told through an artists lifetime, and when you come of age in your early twenties you’re confronted with movies and artwork that you love or you hate and you’re defined in a certain way as a kind of aesthetic being, and then you spend your life sort of working out those things, and trying to find yourself within that frame of influences.”

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: Website | Instagram

“Most of the pictures I take are very bad, because to get the good pictures is almost impossible. If you went out in the morning and said ‘today I’m only gonna take good pictures’ you wouldn’t get anywhere. You wouldn’t even start. So you’ve got to have that momentum of shooting, and you’ve got to have found the right subject, the right place, the right time, and then things will start to happen.”

Photographer, writer, and filmmaker, Eugene Richards, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he studied photography with Minor White. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called” War on Poverty.”  Following a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, Eugene helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, which reported on black political action as well as the Ku Klux Klan.  Photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, 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 chose The 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.
• In This Brief Life - his forthcoming, Kickstarter funded book.
• Why he self-publishes books.
• His change of heart about the value of Instagram
• Why going through his archive was an ‘obsessive experience’
• Being ‘out of touch with what journalism is’
• The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room
• Tips on getting to know people on a story
• Below The Line: Living Poor in America
• The Blue Room
• Returning to Arkansas
• Documentary project Thy Kingom Come
• Cemetery project
• Exploding Into Life
• Many Voices
• Why he left Magnum

Referenced:

• Ed Barnes
• Peter Howe
• Eugene Smith Award
• Dorothea Lynch
• Cornell Capa
• John Morris
• Howard Chapnick
• Jim Hughes, Camera Arts
• Minor White
• Roy DeCarava
• Walker Evans
• FSA
• Bill Brandt
• William Klein
• Mike Nichols
• Terence Malick
• Koudelka
• Leonard Freed
• Reni Burri
• Mary Ellen Mark
• Nachtwey
• Salgado

Website | Instagram| New book

“You’re sitting there with thirty or forty contacts books all over the floor, and you find yourself staying up late into the night thinking ‘there has to be something there’ and finding nothing at all. And the people on Instagram write to you and say, ‘oh my God, I’d love to look at your contact sheets’ and I tell them quite honestly, probably not, because they’re gonna disappoint the shit out of you!”

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.”

Featuring:

• 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

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.”