The Photowalk

Neale James

The Photowalk is a mailbag-driven podcast where we walk and make pictures together, and meet with special guests along the trail. For anyone who likes to take pictures. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

  1. 1d ago

    #551 The courage to be afraid

    This week, my guest is Kim Frank, an American writer, editor, photographer, filmmaker and explorer who set off for The Himalaya in 2018, determined to find a story worthy of National Geographic, despite knowing very little about the region. She discovered a growing conflict between people and endangered Asian elephants. Ancient elephant migration routes now cross farms, villages and railway lines, with devastating consequences for both humans and elephants. Kim kept returning, documenting the lives of those caught up in the conflict and the efforts being made to help both species live alongside one another. Those journeys became her book, Elephants in the Hourglass, and the documentary Where the Forest Roars.  We talk about the personal circumstances that first sent her travelling, the extraordinary encounters along the way, storytelling, photography and finding the courage to do things that frighten us. And Kim, despite everything she's achieved, admits she's frightened of almost everything. Also on the show, a curious case of mistaken location involving a library and a laundry room; Pascal Bernardon discovers photography and the wider world it opens up; Matt Goff talks about neurodiversity as a creative superpower; and Dreich McCrabbit downsizes his camera kit as winter approaches in Clashnessie. Plus, Ewen Bell shares a moment about travel, and Kim Frank returns with her own moment of wonder. Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily.

  2. Oct 2

    #550 What have we become?

    Marc Asnin joins me to talk about ACT 1: A Century in the Making, an ambitious book and exhibition looking at the first twenty-five years of this century through photography. More than 100 photographers, six continents, nine major themes and work by names including Eugene Richards, Platon, David Burnett and Albert Watson. We talk about what those photographs reveal about the first twenty-five years of this century, and what Marc discovered when he began looking at them together as a record of the times we've lived through. We also explore Marc's own documentary work. Uncle Charlie grew into an almost thirty-year portrait of his uncle and godfather, Charlie Henschke. Final Words collected the last statements of 578 people executed on death row in Texas, later developing into We the People Confess, bringing photography, sound, testimony and historical material together to examine capital punishment. In the mailbag, Matthies Wesche wonders whether making videos for YouTube is getting in the way of making still photographs. Lauren McClanahan writes about unplugging, younger people and AI, while Phil Ferris has been learning when it's time to shut doors. Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily. BUY THE 1st AND 2nd EDITIONS OF OUR ZINE: REFLECTIONS

  3. Sep 25

    #549 "I admit my addiction! and..."

    My guest today is documentary photographer Ed Kashi, who returns to The Photowalk. Across a career spanning more than four decades, Ed has photographed some of the most powerful and major social and political stories of our time. We talk about the power of mature storytelling eyes, returning to photographs made decades ago and seeing them differently, and what experience changes about the way you work. Then we turn to something photography is increasingly facing: trust. If AI can make a convincing photograph of an event that never happened, and even construct a believable photographic history around it, what happens to our belief in the photograph as evidence or reality? Ed has spent his working life documenting real people and real events, so I wanted to know how he sees what comes next, and far from a gloomy outlook, he has hope for the medium of photography for the decades to come. Also today, Rob Lee discovers ethnography after losing his enthusiasm for photography, David Higton finds a kitchen table with a story, Richard Rawlings goes looking for pools of light, and our growing collection of Moments recordings brings words on silence from Adriano Henney and beauty from Ewen Bell. Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily. BUY THE NEW SHOW ZINE, REFLECTIONS

  4. Sep 18

    #548 "Photography is a powerful microphone!"

    My mother kept an old biscuit tin in the larder. Inside this tin was the sort of collection that somehow accumulates over a lifetime: old coins, buttons, nuts and bolts, stamps that were no longer worth whatever was printed on them, keys that probably opened something once, and assorted little objects nobody could quite bring themselves to throw away. Years later, the idea of this tin, has found its way into The Photowalk. Mine, though, contains questions. This week, I open it with one of the show's great friends, David duChemin, an award-winning wildlife and humanitarian photographer, author, teacher and, for many photographers, a mentor. He tackles questions from the tin, and there are a couple of bigger questions I want to put to him this time about resilience and relevance. Where does resilience come from, and what keeps a creative person moving when confidence disappears, plans go wrong, or life simply gets in the way? Then there's relevance. As photographers, how much should we care about remaining relevant? Relevant to whom, exactly? And what happens as we get older, as the industry around us changes and our reasons for making photographs change with it? Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily. BUY THE NEW SHOW ZINE, REFLECTIONS

  5. Sep 4

    #546 Honesty, vulnerability and inspiration

    There have been some extraordinary photographers walking with me on The Photowalk over the years, sharing their work, their lives, what they've learned and the reasons they continue to pick up a camera. But this programme has always belonged to you as well. Every week, photographs and stories arrive from around the world: places you've stumbled across, people you've met, pictures that have come to mean more than you expected, and walks taken because you simply needed to get out for a while. The Photowalk became as much about what happens while we're out there as the pictures we bring home. Photography gives us a reason to look, and walking gives us the time to notice. From there we find ourselves talking about creativity, friendship, family, loss, confidence, getting older, curiosity, mental health and all the other stuff that finds its way into life. I've always been more interested in why you pressed the shutter than which button you pressed to do it. Why you stopped. Why something caught your attention. Why you went out that morning with a camera in the first place. So today I'm handing the show over to you: your pictures, your letters, your walks and the things you've noticed along the way. Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond. Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily. BUY THE NEW SHOW ZINE, REFLECTIONS

4.7
out of 5
133 Ratings

About

The Photowalk is a mailbag-driven podcast where we walk and make pictures together, and meet with special guests along the trail. For anyone who likes to take pictures. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

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