Real Photo Show with Michael Chovan-Dalton

Our 1st April Fools Show - Hope you enjoyed it! - Kai and Michael respond to all of the great listener feedback on iTunes and start their spring with a new format and guest-free show. Check out our photo news, lens reviews, and developer debate. We also check-in with thePhotoShow roving reporter, Kerry Van Pacings, fresh from the Las Vegas PCM Show. In this episode: New cameras, new lenses, photo...

"As time marches on where we've become more of a technical society…we've become removed…alienated from making things, there's also a sense of a lack of community…and I think that's what we do at Penumbra, the idea that we bring people together…" Photo Credit: © Gabriela Hnizdo Geoffrey Berliner is the Executive Director of the Penumbra Foundation. An impressive organization devoted to both histori...

"We know how beautiful of a machine that is, but right now mine is at home and for me to get to that point or to that break, was not easy…the whole notion of that rangefinder and that 35mm - 1.4. That whole thing is forever a part of me." Jeff Mermelstein is, for lack of a better term, a New York street photographer. He is the recipient of an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship and the European Pu...

"We spend a lot of time fundraising because a lot of this grant money goes directly to the artist so we need to make that up with…how do we pay for our rent, how do we pay for the lights, how do we pay me?" -Libby Pratt Lucas Thorpe hosted a panel discussion on non-profits and the arts back in December of 2016 and one of his panel members was Libby Pratt, Director of Baxter Street at the Camera Cl...

"I was sort of like the teenage cub photographer of the Black Panther paper. They let me move around with all of the leaders of the party, I would ride around with them and take pictures and work on the newspaper." Jeffrey Henson Scales has been photographing since he was 11 years old and he started working for the Black Panther Newspaper as a young teenager. When he was 14 Time magazine ran one o...

"I was in London, Mary Ellen was working there (in Seattle) and I think it was the first night she was there, she saw Tiny get out of a cab in the parking lot of the Monastery night club and she said, Oh my god, this is a film." Photo Credit: © Lisen Stibeck, Mary Ellen and Martin in Iceland, 2014 Filmmaker Martin Bell talks about how he and Mary Ellen Mark came to document Tiny and how it began a...

"It's not always just the gender, it's the lives women lead and that makes it very difficult to be part of the commercial route…you don't fit the model of the young artist, in my case being deeply immersed in the domestic world raising a family, unable to pursue the things that the artistic model demands." -Tricia Wright Pen + Brush, a nearly 123-year-old non-profit focused on creating access to t...

"I decided it was time to do something that I really love and that had to combine cameras and making things." Justin Waldinger founded Tap & Dye because he wanted to be able to use his design skills to do something he really cared about, so he quit his job and started his own company. Tap & Dye is now known internationally as the place to get high end custom leather straps and accessories...

"That very same day that I started I was shot by an Israeli soldier. I was shot with an…M6 or M16 rifle…and I almost certainly should have died..." Yola Monakhov Stockton has so many great stories to tell. Born in the former Soviet Union, grew up in NYC, became a conflict photographer, got shot, transitioned to the art world, published a book, and now teaches in Buffalo. Kai and Michael had a fant...

"Books make us feel less alone…That's why I make books." -Thomas Roma A special release from thePhotoShow without your co-hosts. Thomas Roma and Susan Kismaric held a conversation about publishing photo books and Roma's launch of SPQR Editions. The talk took place at Affirmation Arts in NYC where SPQR's first five books on were on display and for sale with the photographers on hand to sign all of...

"One of the big conversations that Ben and I have always had and always kind of bristled against together is this idea…that all potential is exhausted in photography, and so there is this sense that there is nothing left for photography, which we couldn't possibly believe." -Nat Nat Ward and Ben Alper were busy organizing all kinds of great events surrounding their successful online image-based co...

Michael and Kai met up with Richard Bram while he was getting ready to move from New York to London. Richard's book, Richard Bram New York, had just been published and symbolically it had become Richard's summation of his time as a street photographer in New York City. We discussed his early induction into In Public, a street photographer collective, where he met Matt Stuart, his start as a PR pho...

"….the fact is most of how we understand life…we do in essentially narrative terms and the moment that you make a photograph you step outside of that. There's no before, there's no after, there's no story, there's only a set of…quite trivial facts that you can look at that imply all sorts of things." Leo Rubinfien believes in working carefully and methodically. He thinks of his photographs as bein...

Joe Aguirre and Kramer O'Neill join Kai and Michael for the first multi-guest show. Joe and Kramer both belong to different photo collectives. These modern day international photo clubs/societies have grown simultaneously with the rise of sharing photos through zines, blogs, and social media. Joe and Kramer also share their ideas about what being called a street photographer means, if it means any...

Preston Rescigno has straddled the worlds of photojournalism and fine art photography for all of his photographic life. When I spoke to Preston he was getting ready to drive his son to college and he was recently unemployed. Preston was the New York Desk photo editor for a very large photo agency for many years. We talk about his background in the news business, his time working for Lee Friedlande...

"Even for my students that naturally have a lot of enthusiasm and interest in the natural landscape, we talk about the natural landscape in political terms because there's no part of the world, no matter where you go, that hasn't been impacted by both the presence of humans but also the political decisions and impact that human beings make." Wendel White is the Distinguished Professor of Art at St...

"Right now I know that for me the gallery model isn't working and so I go into this new chapter with much more confidence in what I am going to be doing day to day than I actually do right now." Sasha Wolf is well known in the photography world for her gallery and her passion for photography. Kai and Michael sat down with Sasha just a couple of weeks before the final closing of her gallery in the...

"It's almost the opposite of daring…I find life to be difficult sometimes, this is my way of dealing with it. I photograph the deepest fears, or happiness, or joys, or flaws or whatever, and I share them with the world and then they are no longer a secret. There is something very healing and liberating about it." Elinor Carucci is a photographer because she discovered from her very first photograp...

"There's this idea for me of like time travel…the closest we get to time travel is this awareness that photographers have …that things will change…and also I've lived long enough that now I can look back 30 years ago…and I've lost some people over the years like there's been people that you know and I'm kind of like I can't believe I didn't take a picture that day." Greg Miller is a Guggenheim Fel...

"I left The Cooper Union completely kind of broken just because of the conversations that I was having in terms of things like race, in terms of things like who gets to make art…and I ended up working construction for a year." Claudio Nolasco sits down with Kai and Michael at Patrice Helmar's home in the Bronx just before a Camera and Supper Club presentation. Claudio speaks about his life in term...

"It's always a balance you kind of have to have…being active and engaging and then stepping back…I reduce totally myself to the camera. Forget about me and how I look… I am really just there to take a picture." Louisa Marie Summer is a German born documentary photographer living in Brooklyn. While she was an MFA student at Rhode Island School of Design she was struck by how diverse the neighborhoo...

"Do you come home like troubled in your head, yes, but you come back home, you have the comfort of home…but here Brazil is home and now I need to learn to leave it behind again…" André Liohn is an incredible war and documentary photographer. He has seen some of the worst violence that humans can inflict on one another. His experiences have helped shape him into a deeply philosophical photographer....

"What I tell my students is…the one thing we can not teach and they can not buy is time, and time is the key to it, you just have to keep going out there…you have to be extremely positive, you can’t go out there thinking nothing is going to happen" Matt Stuart is an extremely positive person. He's the kind of photographer where, after you have a conversation with him, you just want to run outside...

"When you're essentially trying to get baseballs and magazines signed everyday for seven days, it does kind of become its own thing and takes on a life of its own. What you're doing more than anything is collecting, you know you're in a collector's mentality...That's something I guess I was born with, but having explored it, I definitely understand the idea of being a completist." Giancarlo T. Rom...

"We used to buy pictures and I'd say, well how much are your photographs, and they would say, um $25.00, and I'd say, why don't you make it $50.00…" We pickup with Susan on her point about still seeing photographs that are unlike other photographs and discuss the influences and effects that the post-modern period brought to photography. Susan talks a bit more about her time with John Szarkowski at...