Photography Down The Line

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Craig Easton and Lottie Davies. Craig Easton is a Scottish photographer whose work is deeply rooted in the documentary tradition. He makes long-term projects exploring issues around social policy, identity and a sense of place, in a research-based practice that weaves a narrative between contemporary experience and hist...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kavi Pujara. Kavi Pujara is a self-taught photographer making personal, long-term documentary photo projects in his home town of Leicester. His work is included in this years Hayward Gallery touring group exhibition: After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. His debut project 'This Golde...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Craig Atkinson from Café Royal Books. This episode was recorded to coincide with the exhibition CAFÉ ROYAL BOOKS at Stills which ran from 10 November 2023 to 10 February 2024. Craig Atkinson is an artist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. In 2005 he founded Café Royal Books and since 2012 he has been...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Alicia Bruce. Alicia Bruce is an award-winning, working-class photographer, community collaborator, educator, and activist based in Scotland. Her photography sits between documentary and staged imagery focusing on communities, environments, and human rights. Alicia Bruce is a member of the collective Women Photograph. H...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Markéta Luskačová. This special episode of Photography Down The Line is a recording of a conversation between Ben Harman and the photographer Markéta Luskačová at a public event held at Stills, Edinburgh on 12th August 2023. The event marked the launch of Luskačová's solo exhibition at Stills.  Markéta Luskačová was...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kelly O'Brien. Kelly O'Brien is a creative worker, documentary photographic artist, educator and PhD researcher. Within her working practice, Kelly explores visual transformation and storytelling in connection to personal and political narratives through making and theory. She is interested in the photographic r...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Marilena Vlachopoulou. Marilena Vlachopoulou is a documentary and portrait photographer from Athens based in Glasgow. Since graduating from Kelvin College in 2018, she has been documenting Glasgow’s music scene and gig landscape in a variety of analogue formats. Her work has been featured widely, from the pages of The H...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Sophie Gerrard. Sophie Gerrard (Scottish, b.1978) is an award-winning international artist working within the field of photography. Her practice is characterised by sensitive and evocative visual exploration of the natural environment and our relationship to it.   Sophie’s work has been included in publications includin...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Jonjo Borrill. Jonjo Borrill was born on the North-East coast of England. After a childhood of struggling to express himself, photography became a cathartic outlet for his thoughts and feelings about the world. As his photographic practice matured, Borrill's interest became documenting others' stories and giving them a...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Ishiuchi Miyako. This special episode of Photography Down The Line is a recording of a conversation between Ben Harman and the photographer Ishiuchi Miyako at a public event held at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh on 2nd August 2022. The event marked the launch of Miyako's solo exhibition at Stills, the first...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Oliver Raymond Barker. Oliver Raymond Barker works with the mechanics and alchemy of photography to make images, objects and structures that expand upon what photography is and can be. Working predominantly with alternative analogue techniques he uses photography as a tool to uncover imagined narratives & unseen pro...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kirsty Mackay. Kirsty Mackay is a documentary photographer, activist and filmmaker. Her research-led documentary practice highlights social issues surrounding gender, class and discrimination. She has an MA in Documentary photography from University of South Wales, Newport. Her current book project  The Fish That N...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Ada Trillo. Ada Trillo is a Philadelphia-based photographer. Born and raised in the U.S/ Mexican border region of Juarez and El Paso, her work focuses on sex trafficking, climate and violence-related international migration, and long-standing barriers of race and class. Her projects have been featured in international p...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Oana Stanciu. Oana Stanciu is a visual artist from Romania, living and working in Edinburgh. Her work combines performance, photography and moving image to create unnatural and subtly distorted self-portraits. As a student, she began experimenting with alter-egos and this has informed much of her work since. She merges...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Caroline Douglas. Caroline Douglas is an artist working with photography and moving image. She is undertaking a  PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art , researching the role of women in early Scottish photography, and is a recipient of the AHRC-techne Scholarship (2017). Douglas is currently working as a Lect...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Marilyn Stafford. Marilyn Stafford was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA in 1925. She planned to become an actress and singer following her training at the Cleveland Playhouse. In 1947, having moved to New York City where she was given small acting roles off Broadway and in early television, Stafford was given a Rolleif...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Alex Boyd. Alex Boyd is a photographer, writer and curator whose work largely focused on studies of landscape and trauma. He is author of the Saltire Award shortlisted St Kilda - The Silent Islands  and The Isle of Rust, a collaboration with writer and critic Jonathan Meades. He is currently undertaking a prac...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks Stephen Koch, Director of The Peter Hujar Archive. Stephen Koch is the author of two novels and five books of nonfiction, ranging from history to literary history and a handbook on creative writing called The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop . Koch has steadily written essays and reviews about literature, art, and the...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Rosy Martin. Rosy Martin (born in London, 1946) is an artist-photographer, psychological-therapist, workshop leader, lecturer and writer. She explores the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes using self-portraiture, still life photography and video. Starting in 1983, working wi...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Chris Leslie. BAFTA Scotland (New Talent) Award Winning photographer and filmmaker Chris Leslie began taking photographs whilst volunteering in the Former Yugoslavia in 1996. He then went on to work as a photographer, filmmaker and communications manager for an International NGO documenting stories across Afri...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Lorna Macintyre. Lorna Macintyre is an artist based in Glasgow. She studied for both a BA (1999) and MFA (2007) at The Glasgow School of Art. Her solo exhibitions include: Pieces of You Are Here , Dundee Contemporary Arts (2018); Spolia , Cample Line, Dumfriesshire (2017); Much Marcle , Chapter, Cardiff (2016); Material...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Sekai Machache Sekai Machache is a visual artist and curator based between Dundee and Glasgow, Scotland. Her work is a deep interrogation of the notion of self. Having been born in Zimbabwe and raised in Scotland, she has a particular interest in W.E.B Dubois’ notion of Double Consciousness, which expresses the psycholo...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Paul Hill. Paul Hill is a photographer, journalist, author and teacher who is widely regarded as a major influence on contemporary British photography, Born in 1941 in Ludlow, Shropshire, Hill worked as a newspaper reporter from the late 1950s until he became a freelance photographer in 1965. As a photojournal...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Crystal Bennes. Crystal Bennes is an American-born artist and writer based in Scotland. Her mixed media practice is grounded in long-term projects that foreground archival research, durational fieldwork and material experimentation. Since 2015, much of her work has been interested in the culture of international particl...

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Simon Murphy. Simon Murphy is a photographer based in Glasgow. His career has enabled him to travel extensively shooting human interest stories in countries such as Bangladesh, The Democratic republic of Congo, Rwanda and Cambodia. His portraiture subjects range from individuals such as the Dalai Lama to musicians and a...