Real Photo Show with Michael Chovan-Dalton

"My sister and I would take our money [meant] for the collection box and drive downtown in Parkersburg West Virginia...and buy the New Yorker for that week and two candy bars and then we would drive the car to the city park and sit and read the New Yorker...and eat our candy bars and then go home and pretend we'd gone to mass." Michael & Kai sit down with Susan Kismaric in her Manhattan apartm...

"They didn't really care about communism at all, but they were just doing it because it was giving them an opportunity for better living, so they were just being smart about it. But they were atheists, because it was super super strict back then...and if you didn't want to disappear, if you didn't want to go out to camp or whatever you had to be an atheist." Michael and guest co-host, Dennis Sante...

"...the piece I had there had a big pillow pile in the middle of the room and all of a sudden at a certain point I looked over and the pillow pile was filled with children like it had become like the ball pit of open studios..." Michael and Kai sit down with Rachel at Columbia University to discuss her show, Love 2016, that she curated at the Leroy Neiman Gallery in New York. Rachel is currently a...

"...as the hick from Louisville who went to Chicago I always wanted to be in New York and I was in fact doing my Lunchtime photographs in Chicago at that moment, I loved the idea of working on the streets of New York, and frankly, most candidly, the job didn't seem like a sales job to me, because it wasn't, it was a curatorial job, it was a way to make a statement about what photography is or was...

"My father would say, 'son you just don't see it.' What's to see, I would respond. 'It's in the horizon line.' Didn't get it. Flip forward 10 years...I'm a senior in the University of Illinois...and as always the case...photography was in the basement of the basement and as I went down the stairs...above the transom was a long panorama of the Illinois landscape. I looked at it and said, oh my god,...

"A lot of my thanks have to go to Bob (Fishkin) because he was in many ways a surrogate father figure to me besides my own dad, because he offered me opportunities that no one else had before." Kai and Michael visit Jeff Hirsch at his famed camera store, Foto Care in NYC. Jeff lays out the storied history of Foto Care from its start as the Underground Gallery on 10th Street where Duane Michals had...

"...she has like her cheerleading jacket inside glass and kind of on an easel, and all kinds of pictures of her daughter, and a swing outside on the lawn that has a plaque on it..." Kathy Shorr started out in photography by photographing her children and being told they were pretty good photographs. From there she took a night class at the School of Visual Arts and was told by her professor that t...

"So I was obsessed with smoke on a number of levels and I had to smoke like 20 cigarettes an hour in order to produce these pictures which was supposedly going to help me quit." Eileen Quinlan's photographic work explores the history, the tradition, and the boundaries of the medium itself. She has had amazing success as a working artist, Eileen is represented by Campoli Presti in London and Miguel...

"I'm looking at my son's grandfather's pictures and...I felt like I was trying to explain to him who his grandfather [is.] I didn't mean to do it, I've never talked about Lee's pictures in front of Lee before." Part 2 of our conversation with Thomas Roma begins with Tom continuing to speak about the time he spent with Garry Winogrand, Tod Pappageorge, Paul McDonough, and Lee Friedlander. Also, Tom...

"There's this expression, 'The Decisive Moment,' I'm sure it functioned for a while, but the question in a photograph isn't when, it's why...I want people to look at my photographs and the 'why' is there, it's how I teach photography, it's all one thing for me." Thomas Roma has been a teacher and mentor to many photographers, including me. His list of accomplishments, which includes fourteen and c...

"So when I found out that the flash didn't really affect the roosters at all, then that's when I started photographing." Tony Chirinos calls in to talk about how he got started in photography and his ten year graduation plan at Miami Dade College where he now teaches photography. His journey into the medical world helped him produce his haunting photos of surgery, surgical instruments, and morgues...

"We had decided we were going to make a short documentary in 16mm, which I had never shot...and we decided we were going to make it about dominatrixes." Sasha Waters-Freyer is an experimental and documentary filmmaker. Her work has been screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Rotterdam and more. Sasha is also the Chair of Photography and Film at Virginia Co...

"My father was an insurance person, a loss control specialist, and so he knew about Cooper Union because he inspected the building. So he found out that hey there's a thing that my daughter could go to and it's tuition free and why the heck doesn't she apply." Top secret pool-playing forensic photographer Laura Sellers isn't on social media, doesn't have a website, doesn't like texting, but loves...

"Humble yourself, and let's talk about just how much you get rejected." Jared Thorne skypes in from his new home and new photo teaching job at Ohio State University at Columbus to talk about his experiences as a photographer and his desire to both understand and challenge preconceived notions of Black identity. His investigation (and a girlfriend) will take him to South Africa where he explores th...

"You have a vacuum cleaner that's reversed, a couple of pipe fittings, and now an old barbecue that you cut the bottom out of and you have a forge that you can use...and we started making knives in the backyard..." Dennis has degrees in Neuroscience and Behavior, Environmental Health Science, and Visual Arts. It's no surprise that many of his answers in our conversation are carefully explained fro...

"We used to go out to the woods and capture scorpions, spiders, and stuff like that." After 17 years away from home, Yoav has returned to Israel as a photographer who has been educated in the United States and influenced by an international community. Yoav took a break from teaching after establishing the Savannah College of Art and Design Photography Program in Hong Kong, and now has returned to...

"Throughout my adolescence in high school years I was really only consumed with two things like skateboarding…and music and the music was all punk and hardcore…" Jeff Ladd collects, studies, reviews, and just generally loves photography books. He is a founding member of Errata Editions, an organization dedicated to the page by page printed studies of rare and out-of-print photo books and making th...

“Memorial Day is a very sad day (in Israel), everyone stands still for one minute. We never go and do barbecue…we don’t have sales…and we don’t think about it as a day off…” Inbal's work involves memory, conflict, and the way we memorialize war. In 2012 she was nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet award for her "Nothing Left Here but the Hurt" series. Her subject matter is deeply connected to...

"I’m not dumb, I like Europe" Patrice got her start in photography as a young camera tester for allegedly broken tourist cameras at her father’s photography store in Alaska. She holds two masters degrees, one in education and the other, an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Her plan now is to split her time between Alaska and New York City for as long as she can continue to find work. Hosts: Mi...

"Grad School, look I already dropped out of undergrad, why would I go to grad school, it's another waste of money. You want to be an artist, be an artist…" Kai had an interesting childhood as he and his mother worked their way across the country from Hawaii to North Carolina. It has a lot to do with why he became a photographer. He also apologizes to all of the Kai McBrides out there for grabbing...

"Everything in Cuba became sinister and funny." Frequent co-host Anibal and I met at his home in New Jersey during a coyote scare. Anibal’s life in photography very much tracks my own. We both attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC together where we met Thomas Roma, a photo professor who has had a profound impact on our photography and ten years later we both attended Columbia University’s MFA...