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.”

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

Website | Instagram | Interview with David Campany

“To look at something completely ordinary, what you see day to day in your life, and pay attention to it, that’s what interests me. And just from years of trying it and doing it, I feel like it provides a certain kind of food for people, that it’s nourishing.”

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.”

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

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?’”

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 the shift from that point. It was almost night and day. I really took it to heart and found it quite depressing, that societal turn towards anti-immigrant populism.”

187 - Bryan Schutmaat

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.”

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.”

185 - Rich Joseph-Facun

Rich Joseph-Facun is a photographer of Indigenous Mexican and Filipino descent. His work aims to offer an authentic look into endangered, bygone, and fringe cultures—those transitions in time where places fade but people persist.

The exploration of place, community and cultural identity present themselves as a common denominator in both his life and photographic endeavors.

Before finding “home” in the Appalachian Foothills of southeast Ohio, Rich roamed the globe for 15 years working as a photojournalist. During that time he was sent on assignment to over a dozen countries, and for three of those years he was based in the United Arab Emirates.

His photography has been commissioned by various publications, including NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian (UK), among others. Additionally, Rich’s work has been recognized by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, CNN, Juxtapoz, British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post and Pictures of the Year International. 

In 2021 his first monograph 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…”

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. Preview Wednesday 10 August 5-8pm. Small Voice listeners welcome!
 

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 ‘hi, this is me and this is what my work’s about…’ I would vomit in my mouth. I just wouldn’t be able to do it. But someone else, that might be who they are, and there’s actually nothing wrong with that. That might be very natural for them so it wouldn’t be a forced interaction.”