A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers (complete member-only archive)

Magnum Photos member Carolyn Drake studied Media/Culture and History at Brown University, where she became interested in the ways that history and reality are purposefully shaped and revised over time, and in the ways that artists can interrupt and shift these narratives. After graduating, she worked for multimedia companies in New York but eventually left her office job at the age of 30 to engage...

English photographer Robin Maddock is probably best known for his personal approach to documentary photography, looking at different places and the states of mind of people that inhabit them. His first two photography books were about aspects of England. Our kids Are Going to Hell (2009) is a portrait of the social interactions of youth and the police in Hackney, London. This work was nominated fo...

Rena Effendi is an Azerbaijani photographer, born in the capital, Baku, whose work focuses on issues of post-conflict society, social justice, and the oil industry’s effect on people and the environment. Rena, as she puts it herself, spent half her childhood in one country and the rest in another, growing up during the war, political instability, and economic collapse that marked Azerbaijan's path...

This years field report from the annual Photo London festival, featuring a personal, chaotic and non-comprehensive selection of chats, discussions, soundbites and random witterings.

This week on the podcast I chart to Spencer Murphy, who has just published his first photo book, Urban Dirt Bikers, with Hoxton Mini Press. Their website describes Spencer as a fine art and commercial photographer. I would add documentary photographer to that. But he is probably best known for his portrait photography. In 2013 he won the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, h...

Daniella Zalcman is a documentary photographer based in London and frequently to be found in New York City, where she took a degree in architecture at Columbia University and began her photographic career as a jobbing newspaper photographer for the New York Daily News. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, an...

Ian Derry started his career 35 years ago at the tender age of 15 when he embarked on an old school apprenticeship in regional newspaper photography, cutting his teeth in the early 80’s during a huge national news story: the Falklands war. From that solid and in many ways enviable foundation there followed a natural and necessary move to London where he immediately began working for the national p...

Magnum legend David Alan Harvey was born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised in Virginia. He discovered photography at the age of eleven. Thereafter he purchased a used Leica with savings from his newspaper route and began photographing his family and neighborhood in 1956. When he was twenty, he lived with and documented the lives of a black family in Norfolk, Virginia, and the resulting book, Tel...

Annie Collinge started her career part way through her degree at Brighton University at the tender age of seventeen, assisting esteemed portrait photographer Harry Borden (ep. 15 & 16). She went on to work extensively in the editorial world for publications such as Vice, Dazed, Pylot and The Guardian. She has simultaneously worked on various personal projects which tend to straddle the increasingl...

As a child, Magnum photographer Mark Power discovered his father's home-made enlarger in the family attic, a contraption consisting of an upturned flowerpot, a domestic light bulb and a simple camera lens. His interest in photography probably began at this moment, though he later went to art college to study life-drawing and painting instead. After graduating, he travelled for two years around Sou...

Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington DC in 1981. He studied history at Yale University, where his interest in journalism led him to take a photography course, during which he had an almost mystical experience and realised immediately that he'd found his calling.  His work largely concentrates on America, looking at issues of conflict, identity, power, race and class. He also works extensively...

Briony Campbell works both as a photographer and, increasingly, as a film maker. Here’s what she says on her website: I work with photography and video, to tell stories about who we are and how we understand each other. I shoot promos, documentaries, events and campaigns for arts, education, research and social innovation clients. She has a Masters degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photogr...

Magnum member Bieke Depoorter is a 30 year old Belgian photographer. Bieke has a masters degree in photography from the Royal academy of fine art in Ghent and in 2009 won the Magnum expression award for her work in Russia, a project which later became her first book entitled Ou Menya in which she established a unique working practice whereby she stays each night with a different stranger or strang...

“Mark Neville has re-imagined what documentary photography could be, should be. Instead of the bland ‘deconstructions’ that pass so lazily as ‘critical’ in contemporary art, he makes extraordinary pictures and finds extraordinary ways to get them back to those he has photographed” — David Campany In episode 044, Mark discusses, among other things: His upcoming exhibition, Child's Play New work in...

Simon Roberts is a British photographer based in Brighton, on the south coast of England, whose work deals with our relationship to landscape and notions of identity and belonging. Often employing expansive, large-format landscape photographs, his approach is one of creating wide-ranging surveys of our time, which communicate on important social, economic and political issues. Simon is perhaps bes...

London-based German photographer Philip Ebeling grew up in a small village in Germany before making his escape to London at the age of 19 where he took a degree in photography at the London College of Printing. He subsequently won the Observer Hodge Award which kickstarted his career as a jobbing editiorial portrait photographer. In 2010, along with his wife, Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur, who...

Interview deleted. Listen to this short message for a brief explanation as to why.

Gideon Mendel's intimate style of image making and long-term commitment to projects has earned him international recognition and many awards, over a 30+ year career as a documentary photographer and social activist. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1959, studied Psychology and African History at the University of Cape Town and began photographing in the 1980s during the dark days of ap...

Daniel Castro Garcia studied Spanish and Latin American Literature at University College London and after graduating went on to work in the UK film, commercial and music video industry where he still works as a freelance first assistant director. That’s how he pays the bills but for the past 5 years his real passion has been for photography. Having started out as a street photographer working on p...

Juno Calypso is a 2012 graduate of the BA Photography degree course at London College of Communication, where her degree show was awarded both the Hotshoe Portfolio Award and the Michael Wilson Photographic Prize. In 2013 The Independent noted Juno Calypso as the ‘One To Watch’, as have numerous other publications since. The Catlin Art Guide featured Juno as one of 40 of the most promising new art...

Peter Zelewski is a London based portrait and documentary photographer. Born in Detroit, USA, he moved to London in the 1980s and studied graphic design and photography at the London College of Communication (LCC). Through his fascination with people and a love of the city, he was drawn to the streets of London to take photographs of its citizens, resulting in two award-winning projects People of...

After studying Documentary Photography at Newport Art College in Wales, Jocelyn Bain-Hogg began his career as a unit photographer on movie sets, shot publicity stills for the BBC and photographed fashion before returning to his documentary roots where he has largely remained ever since, working on long-term personal projects, editorial assignments and commercial commissions. He is the author of se...

Jane Hilton started out as a classical musician, graduating in 1984 with a degree in Music and Visual Art from Lancaster University. Her love of photography brought her to London, working as an assistant for numerous fashion and advertising photographers, before going it alone in 1988. Early work included both fashion and editorial alongside her documentary projects, which are her passion and the...

Chris Floyd is a British photographer and film maker. His work has appeared in some of the world’s most highly respected publications, including The New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar, GQ, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. He has shot advertising campaigns for British Airways, Apple, Sony and Philips and has been selected several times for the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Portrait Pri...

Magnum legend Chris Steele-Perkins was born in Burma in 1947 to a Burmese mother and an English father, who brought him back to England when he was 2 years old. He published his first photobook The Teds in 1979 and shortly after that joined Magnum photos after an invitation to apply from none other than Josef Koudelka. He subsequently travelled all over the world, covering many of the major global...