Immaterial Voices

What exactly is a photobook? This episode is with longtime artist, bookmaker, photographer, writer, translator, and editor Hans Hickerson. For the past five years or so, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill has been working as a critic, or at least, writing about photobooks, as Contributing Editor at The Photobook Journal. Hans is the Managing Editor of that publication and agreed to come on the s...

In this conversation, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill, sits down with photographer and artist Ryan Searl. Based in Illinois, Searl explores the places that seem off the beaten path, but that are not often too far from home. Across the seemingly endless horizon of industrial agriculture in the American Midwest, Searl locates the coordinates of poetic meaning, but also questions them, attentive...

In this conversation, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill, sits down with photographer and artist Ciel Baptiste. Based in Illinois, Ciel has been exploring and experimenting with film photography, especially black and white, as a means to connect with the landscape and region. In this conversation, O’Neill and Baptiste talk about inspirations in the history of art, as well as from the Farm Securi...

How can we work at the boundaries of the landscape as well as our perceptions? How can we work across multi-media within the context of still image-based projects? How do our projects mobilize a certain poetics? In this conversation, Brian O'Neill and Jeff Smudde discuss paths through higher education like MFA programs, as well as the importance of the mentors one can meet along the way. They also...

How, and by what means, can we capture urban atmospheres and mobility? What can we learn about cities, ourselves, and our societies through these dimensions? Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill becomes the subject of this conversation for the podcast, guest hosted by Tim Hale. They discuss Brian’s book-making work from the past few years and its connections to his training in the social sciences....

How do we learn how to see? How is that images take us over time and space? What modes of practice, and of travel, introduce new ways of seeing? In November of 2024, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill had the opportunity to sit down and have a coffee in Illinois with photographer, writer, and scholar Bill Cope. Initially, the plan was to cover just Bill’s four titles with Immaterial Books, all c...

What is (im)material in the world of photography? What does it mean to be modern? What is the role of the photobook today? How do artists and scholars work across disciplines to craft unique ideas and objects of reflection and how do those objects live on, beyond us? And, what is the meaning of contemporary art in the American Midwest? In this episode, Immaterial Voices host and Immaterial Books c...

The Visual Politics of Elections: A Conversation with Matt Schneider and Gizem Melek Are visuals biased? Is the media biased? Is it possible to be politically neutral? What is the role of “fairness?” How do visuals make themselves felt in elections and who is giving them their meaning? In this episode, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill sits down with two scholars to understand the visual politi...

How do photographers deal with elections? What is the role of the visual in election politics? Photographer and sociologist Tim Hale revisits the podcast and discusses two books little talked about together. The first is Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations , and the second is William Eggleston’s Election Eve . Tim, a one-time newspaper photojournalist, provides insights into his history of image-ma...

Today, Brian O’Neill sits down to talk about “The Grift.” This was a 2023 release by Immaterial Books, and so with the upcoming election and events occupying life in the United States, we thought it an important opportunity to sit down again and speak about the project with the author, Andrew Kochanowski . In this episode, Brian and Andrew cover the book itself and its concept, and so much more: f...

The panel discussion features photographers and scholars from various backgrounds and fields (Julie Patarin-Jossec, Greg Scott, Jessica Hayes, and Micah McCoy) who blended expertise in contemporary photography, sociology, and ethnography to speak about Julie Patarin-Jossec's new book, released by Immaterial Books. The Thread of Water is a reflexive wandering in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea....

Brian O’Neill walks and talks with Tim Hale about the upcoming exhibition, "Fields of Vision: Contemporary Photography in Central Illinois." What influence our orientations to photographic representations of Central Illinois? Are we oriented by geographical boundaries, the rhythms of agricultural landscapes, processes of collective myth-making, lived connections to land and place, or all of the ab...