The MOOD Podcast

I'm joined again by Zahra Ciardi , a registered psychologist and the founder of Ascendant Bali , for a second conversation about the psychology behind photography and creativity. We talk about what happens when a photographer's identity becomes fused with their work, and why that turns making, editing, sharing and feedback into a constant threat. We also talk about how to hold a sense of...

This is a Q&A with questions sent in by photographers from my community. I answer whether your audience needs to understand your photography, if a project shot in a few days can have real depth, how to deal with perfectionism, the small steps behind my own work that nobody saw, and what to do when your work feels stagnant.  If your photography feels stuck or you can’t say what it’s about, some...

THIS IS PART 2 OF A 2 PART CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW GENITEMPO. In Part 2 of my conversation with photographer and publisher Matthew Genitempo , we go deep into his photobooks Mother of Dogs and Dogbreath , and into Trespasse r, the small press he runs with Bryan Schutmaat and Cody Haltom . We talk about making Mother of Dogs on lockdown walks, why its pages are held together with packing tape, an...

THIS IS PART 1 OF A 2 PART CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW GENITEMPO. I sat down with photographer Matthew Genitempo , the graphic designer turned photographer and publisher behind the photobooks Jasper , Mother of Dogs and Dogbreath . In part one we go deep into Jasper , the photobook he made largely in the forests of the Ozarks as his MFA thesis at the University of Hartford: the critique that told hi...

I sat down with Andrea Modica , the ‘Italian Story’ photographer (as well many other books) who has made every photograph since 1980 with an 8x10 view camera and prints all her work herself. Andrea studied with Richard Benson at Yale, teaches photography at Drexel University, and has just published ‘Italian Story’ with L'Artiere , 40 personal years of large format photographs made in and abou...

In this week’s Moments of Mood episode, you’ll learn why I believe meditation is the most direct route to a photographic voice that is unmistakably yours, and exactly what it does to your attention, your creativity and the way you see. I make the full case for meditation as a photography practice. I share my own history with depression, anxiety, loneliness and cancer, the years of therapies and fr...

In this week’s podcast episode you'll learn why the photographs you're most proud of are probably the ones hiding you, and what a documentary photographer who has stood at 600 deaths says it actually costs to make work that changes something. I sat down with Richard Sharum , the American documentary photographer behind Campesino Cuba, Spina Americana and the forthcoming American Homicide...

In this week’s Moments of Mood episode, you'll learn the 4 questions curators, juries, and publishers silently ask about every photography project, and how to answer them in 100 words so your work actually gets seen. I take apart the idea that photography speaks for itself, starting with the Vivian Maier story everyone gets backwards, and share what Shana Lopes, photography curator at SFMOMA,...

Learn exactly what an SFMOMA photography curator looks for, what she passes over, and how to get your work seen without an MFA, a gallery, or a 6-paragraph artist statement. I sat down with Shana Lopes , Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), to find out how photography actually enters a museum collection. Shana has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of...

In this Moments of Mood episode, I get into the question of whether we as photographers should explain our images or let them try and ‘speak for themselves’ , why the readings you want to correct are actually a map to your photographic voice, and the two gaps every photograph has to cross, from Garry Winogrand 's famous riddle to a passage in ' Art & Fear' by David Bayles and Te...

On this episode, I sat down with David Chancellor , the award-winning documentary photographer behind ‘Hunters’, ‘Handle Like Eggs’ , and the Taylor Wessing Prize-winning portrait ‘Huntress with Buck’ , for a conversation about the moral grey areas of documentary photography, trophy hunting, wildlife conservation. David has spent decades photographing human-wildlife coexistence across Africa, slee...

Attention has collapsed, and every photographer feels it. In this Moments of Mood episode, I make the case that this might be the best thing to happen to serious photography in a generation. You'll learn why the photographers who matter from here on won't be the ones who make the most, they'll be the ones who compress the best: one photograph dense enough to stop a stranger mid-scro...

Odette England   makes her photographs and then damages them, and this conversation is about why that is the most honest thing she has ever done with her voice. Odette is an Australian artist, writer and photography professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, whose latest book Isn't X Beautiful is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory and the limits of what a...

In this Moments of Mood episode I sit with a single photograph from my own archive, one I made by accident in under ten seconds, and use it to unpack an idea Cristina Mittermeier gave me: that the photographer is not a messenger but a membrane, a semi-permeable skin whose job is to let a conversation pass between the subject and the stranger who will one day stand in front of the print. I look at...

Trent Davis Bailey spent 7 years photographing a remote farming valley in Colorado, convinced he was making documentary work. He wasn't. The pictures knew before he did: he was searching for the family he'd lost to a twenty-year estrangement, and by the end of The North Fork he had found his aunt, his cousins, and the woman who became his wife. Then he turned the camera toward something...

In this episode you'll discover why beauty in photography is made by your attention, not found in your subjects, and how reading your own form reveals the photographic voice you've been searching for elsewhere. In this Moments of Mood, I sit with one idea from my recent conversation with photographer and writer Tim Carpenter: that beauty in a photograph is form, not subject matter. Drawi...

If you have ever felt technically capable but creatively lost, this conversation shows you how one photographer turned a decade of pictures, and the hardest years of his life, into a body of work that is unmistakably his own. In this episode I sit down with Rory King , an Australian photographer who works in black and white, prints by hand in the darkroom, and turned 10 years of images into his ph...

In this solo episode of Moments of Mood, you'll learn why the flood of AI images is about to make real, human photography more valuable, not less, and how to find the voice that's unmistakably yours. I break down what AI really means for emerging photographers, starting with VSCO's "your eye can't be generated" campaign and the paradox that the same company also build...

In this episode you'll learn how to tell whether your photography is actually art, why chasing technical perfection is holding your work back, and how to develop a photographic voice that's unmistakably your own. This week Matt chats with Ridwan Didot , a fine art documentary and wedding photographer from Indonesia who runs the studio Native Visual and approaches commercial work with the...

Matt sits down with photographer, writer, and educator Tim Carpenter , author of 'To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die' and photobooks such as 'Local Objects', 'Little' and 'Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road', for a deep conversation on the philosophy beneath the photographic image.  In this episode you will learn a way to understand why the form of a photograp...

Matt talks with psychologist Zahra Ciardi , founder of Ascendant Bali , to explore the inner life of the creative person: why so many photographers feel their work isn't truly theirs, the limiting beliefs that keep artists stuck, and how to put your work into the world without being ruled by validation. By the end of this episode you'll understand why your photography stops feeling like...

Cristina Mittermeier is a National Geographic photographer, co-founder of SeaLegacy, and author of " Hope ." Her work has been featured in National Geographic's series " Photographer " and in publications around the world. Cristinais the photographer who coined the term "conservation photography," co-founded SeaLegacy , and made the starving polar bear image seen...

In this episode, Matt sits down with Rich-Joseph Facun , a celebrated American documentary photographer, former photojournalist of 15 years, and founder of the independent publishing imprint Liars Corner.  In this conversation we discuss his three monographs: Black Diamonds, Little Cities, and 1804, the ethics of street and portrait photography, photographing strangers in Trump-era Appalachia, wal...

In this episode, Matt sits down with Miriam Schulman , professional artist, art business coach, host of the Inspiration Place podcast, and bestselling author of Artpreneur (HarperCollins). Miriam left Wall Street after 9/11 to build a six-figure art business and now teaches photographers, painters, and visual artists how to price their work, sell art online, attract collectors, and build a sustain...

In this Moments of Mood episode of The MOOD Podcast, Matt returns after a road accident left him physically immobilised for several weeks, unable to photograph, travel, or work, and uses that enforced stillness to examine one of the quietest but most destructive reflexes in modern photography: the need for proof. What happens to your photography, and to you as a photographer, when the images you m...