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 will fall off into the precipice. You really need to be constantly re-evaluating yourself.”

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

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“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

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 Reverte at Editorial RM
• Daisuke Yokota - Back Yard
• Olof Palme

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“I’m a farmer’s daughter and I know how to grow my own food, and I feel confident in the field or under trees. But then when I go in a gallery and there's an opening and it’s loud and there’s alcohol and this pretentiousness… I don’t get it. I don’t get it. It’s just disgusting, seriously.”

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 Buckets which won the Bill BrandtPrize 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 Water1993, 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 theTwo 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 Bucketswith 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 by Mark Durden, David Campany and an afterword by Peter. The first UK exhibition of Mathematicsopened at Camden Arts Centre, London on the 5th July, and ran to 16th September 2018. The accompanying File Note no 120 published by the gallery, featured a specially commissioned essay The Things That Count by Amy Sherlock, Deputy Editor of Frieze.

In March 2021 Peter received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, to support the production of new work in the UK and across Europe in the time of Covid-19 ‘paying subtle attention to atmosphere and nuance, quietly reflecting on manifestations of our responses to the enormous changes taking place across the human landscape’.
 

On episode 172, Peter discusses, among other things:

• The Pollock Krasner Foundation Award.
• Responses to Covid and his approach.
• Poetic truth vs. documentary truth.
• How he came to live in Hebden Bridge, Manchester.
• Seeing in colour, having made a B&W darkroom.
• His epiphany in the sahara desert.
• The influence of the film, Powers of Ten, which he saw at 15.
• His love of mathematics and how he came to explore it photographically.
• His Two Blue Buckets image and why it’s significant.
• Staying with William Eggleston in the 80s and what he took away from it.
• His ‘lost decade’, broke in London, printing for Martin Parr and other photographers.
   

Referenced:

• Jackson Pollack
• Ted Hughes
• Albert Street Workshop - Ray Elliott and Jenny Beavan 
• Martin Parr
• Charlie Meecham
• Brian Griffin
• Paul Graham
• Charles and Ray Eames - Powers of Ten
• Max Tegmark
• The New Colour Photography by Sally Euclaire
• Jem Southam
• William Eggleston 
• Flannery O’connor
• Volker Helnz
• Marcus Hansen
• Chris Dorley Brown
• Dafna Talmor
• Wolfgang Tillmans
• Nick Serota
• William Scott
• David Chandler

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“I’m absolutely awestruck by the almost incomprehensible beauty and strangeness of everything that is around us. And that goes to the very heart of what I’ve spent 40 years trying to investigate.”

171 - Mimi Plumb

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 Schiek and Lester Rosso - TBW Books
• Rachel and Gregory Barker - Stanley Barker publishing

Website | Instagram

“When I picked up the camera it was like, ‘oh my God’, I could just play... I took to it like a fish to water. That element of photography being fun is always something that I think is really important to making work. And I still hold on to that… I want it to be a fun process.”

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:

• The 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.”

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.”

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

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."

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
• Moving to and working in an English country village
• Her project Zwarte Piet
• My Mothers Cupboards and my Father’s Words
• Fast Forward Women in Photography

Referenced:

• John Dillwyn
• Mary Dillwyn
• Paul Reas
• Paul Searight
• Anthony Haughey
• Tessa Bunney
• David Moore
• Paul Graham
• Martin Parr
• Karen Knor
• Val Williams
• Jane Austen
• Gilbert White
• William Cobbett
• Raymond Williams
• Mieke Bal
• Mark Sealy - Autograph
• Naomi Rosenblaum

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“It’s the discovery of the personal voice, I suppose, and the personal stories that you want to tell, that you can’t articulate. That’s why someone becomes a photographer or a filmmaker… you use photography because you can’t speak it.”