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Photography Down The Line

Photography Down The Line

By Stills: Centre for Photography

Photography Down The Line is a series of conversations initiated by Director of Stills, Ben Harman, about and around photography. Started during the challenging time of the Coronavirus lockdown, this series aims to discuss, celebrate and share the ideas of artists, photographers and others from the sector. Stills is a registered charity and centre for photography based in Edinburgh, UK.
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Photography Down The Line with Craig Atkinson from Café Royal Books (recorded 8 December 2023)

Photography Down The LineDec 21, 2023

00:00
37:59
Photography Down The Line with Craig Atkinson from Café Royal Books (recorded 8 December 2023)
Dec 21, 202337:59
Photography Down The Line with Alicia Bruce (recorded 19 September 2023)

Photography Down The Line with Alicia Bruce (recorded 19 September 2023)

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. Her first monograph 'I Burn But I Am Not Consumed' Daylight Books (USA), 2023 documents sixteen years of Donald Trump’s impact on a coastal Scottish community near where the artist grew up.
Images from this monograph are currently being exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and soon at Lishui Photography Festival, China.
Alicia’s photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, winning several artists’ residencies and bursaries including the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award. Her images have been featured in Le Monde, The Guardian, FT Weekend, The Times, The Scotsman, BBC News and STV News, and are represented in several public and private collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, St Andrews University Special Collections, UK Parliament, Martin Parr Foundation and The RSA. She recently gave talks at Art Institute Chicago, MoCP, Chicago, Columbia College, International Centre for Photography and School of Visual Arts in New York, Aberdeen Art Gallery, BOP Bristol and Stills. Exhibitions include MoCP, Chicago, VU Photo, Quebec, National Galleries of Scotland, Stills, Street Level, Ffotogallery, Impressions Gallery, Open Eye and more.
Her commissioned portfolio features clients including Harpers Magazine (NYC), Reuters, Project Ability, engage, Zero Tolerance, Crisis and more.

As an educator, Alicia has over 15 years experience teaching in communities, galleries and in further and higher education. She is a Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art (Photography and Fine Art) as well as at Edinburgh University Centre for Open Learning. She taught Darkroom, analogue and digital workshops at Street Level Photoworks for over a decade as well as in Scotland's Colleges (Stevenson College, Fife College and City of Glasgow College) and National Galleries of Scotland. She is founder of Portobello Photography School and holds a PDA in teaching.

Current Exhibition
'Love: Still Not the Lesser' Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

Next Exhibition
2023 Lishui Photography Festival, China
In partnership with Format Festival

Website:
www.aliciabruce.co.uk
Instagram: aliciabrucephoto


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Oct 20, 202343:06
Photography Down The Line with Markéta Luskačová (recorded 12 August 2023)

Photography Down The Line with Markéta Luskačová (recorded 12 August 2023)

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 born in 1944 and became a freelance photographer in 1968 whilst undertaking postgraduate studies in Photography at the Academy of Film and Fine Arts, Prague. She relocated to London in 1975 and was a Nominee Photographer with Magnum Photographic Agency, Paris from 1976-80. Since 1971, Luskačová’s work has featured in exhibitions around the world and notable solo exhibitions have been held at the V&A, London (1983-84); Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (1989); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1991); Stills Gallery, Sydney (1998); Leica Gallery, Prague (2014); Tate Britain, London (2018-19); and The Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol (2019).

 

Luskačová's solo exhibition at Stills opened for the Edinburgh Art Festival in August 2023. It brought together more than 50 works from some of Luskačová’s best-known series covering subjects such as: Pilgrims; Juvenile Jazz Bands in the North of England; Durham Cathedral and Chorister School; London Markets; London Street Musicians, Chiswick Women’s Aid and Carnivals in the Czech Republic. Stills worked with Luskačová to select photographs on the theme of children – an interest that permeates almost all of her work and for several years was the main subject of her pictures. By following this thread, we united photographs made around the UK and in Ireland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, dating from 1964-2009. The exhibition has been developed in partnership with the Centre for British Photography, London where it will be presented in 2024.




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Sep 29, 202301:01:33
Photography Down The Line with Kelly O'Brien (recorded: 30 August 2023)
Sep 08, 202350:44
Photography Down The Line with Marilena Vlachopoulou (recorded: 15 May 2023)

Photography Down The Line with Marilena Vlachopoulou (recorded: 15 May 2023)

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 Herald newspaper to the walls of The Benaki Museum, as part of Athens Photo Festival 2020. She has been commissioned by House of VANS London, Govanhill Baths, The Skinny, The Wire, Polaroid and others.


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May 31, 202337:32
Photography Down The Line with Sophie Gerrard (recorded: 19 April 2023)

Photography Down The Line with Sophie Gerrard (recorded: 19 April 2023)

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 including The New York Times and The Guardian. Her work is shown in national and international public institutions including Paris Photo, The Martin Parr Foundation, The Photographers’ Gallery, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, OFF_festival Bratislava, Unseen Amsterdam, FORMAT International Photography Festival, The Fox Talbot Museum, and Perth Museum & Art Gallery. Her work is held in private and national collections including The Sir Elton John Collection, The National Collection of Scotland, The University of St Andrews Collection, Coutts Bank private collection and the StatOil Collection.

 

Sophie has a Masters from The University of The Arts London, and degrees from Edinburgh College of Art and Manchester University.




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May 03, 202345:45
Photography Down The Line with Jonjo Borrill (recorded: 13 December 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Jonjo Borrill (recorded: 13 December 2022)

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 voice and platform to be heard.

In 2022 Borrill completed his Master's degree in photography online at Falmouth University in England, studying in South Korea, where he has lived since 2019.

Borrill's first published book 'The Dragon That Ascended To The Heavens' is part of the Bavarian State Library Manuscripts and Rare Books Artists Collection.


www.jonjoborrill.com

@jonjoborrill (Instagram)



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Jan 20, 202336:15
Photography Down The Line with Ishiuchi Miyako (recorded: 2 August 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Ishiuchi Miyako (recorded: 2 August 2022)

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 ever display of her work in Scotland. Miyako responded to questions with the assistance of an interpreter, the filmmaker Linda Hoaglund. 

Ishiuchi Miyako was born in 1947 and first started taking photographs, self-taught, in the mid-1970s. In 2005, with her series Mother's, she represented Japan at the prestigious Venice Biennale in Italy. Her work has been exhibited and collected by numerous collections and institutions around the world. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2015) and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (2017). Miyako was the recipient of the 2014 Hasselblad Award.

Linda Hoaglund is a bilingual filmmaker born and raised in Japan, where she attended Japanese public schools. A graduate of Yale University, she has directed and produced five films about art and the relationship between Japan and the U.S. including Things Left Behind, a film about the transformative power of Ishiuchi Miyako’s “hiroshima” photographs. Linda’s most recent film, Edo Avant Garde, reveals how Japanese artists innovated many techniques of “modern art” in the 17th and 18th century.

Sep 16, 202201:06:09
Photography Down The Line with Oliver Raymond Barker (recorded: 20 July 2022)
Aug 26, 202243:38
Photography Down The Line with Kirsty Mackay (recorded: 8 June 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Kirsty Mackay (recorded: 8 June 2022)

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 Never Swam, considers class and discrimination against working-class people. Combining first-person narratives with photographs, it takes Glasgow as a case study, looking at the root causes of the city’s poor health outcomes and lower life expectancy.

Examining the relationship between the environment, government policy, historical trauma, and public health. It shifts the emphasis from individual life style choices to the effects that political policies have on our bodies. It will be published as a book in 2021.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Facing Britain group show, an observation of British Documentary Photography since the 60’s alongside works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox & David Hurn, Museum Goch, Germany.

@kirstygmackay (Instagram)

www.kirstymackay.com



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Jun 17, 202243:02
Photography Down The Line with Ada Trillo (recorded: 8 April 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Ada Trillo (recorded: 8 April 2022)

Apr 11, 202226:40
Photography Down The Line with Oana Stanciu (recorded: 25 March 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Oana Stanciu (recorded: 25 March 2022)

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 her body with different objects and environments, improvising scenes and transforming herself into unusual characters and creatures. Her work features black and white photographs, sometimes accompanied by moving image to help bring these characters to life. She usually works with found object but more recently has started experimenting with sculpture and ceramics as well.

Stanciu's work has received several awards including the RSA Morton Award 2021, Ingleby Award, Latimer Award, and the Meyer Oppenheim Award, and in 2019 she received one of the Royal Scottish Academy’s RSA Residencies for Scotland.  Her work has been exhibited in Edinburgh at the Ingleby Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy, as well as in Romania, Norway and other cities in the UK.

www.oanastanciu.com

@oana.asta (Instagram)


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Apr 04, 202237:13
Photography Down The Line with Caroline Douglas (recorded: 10 February 2022)

Photography Down The Line with Caroline Douglas (recorded: 10 February 2022)

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 Lecturer in Fine Art - Photography at The Glasgow School of Art (2021-2022). Recently, she undertook two Doctoral Training Partnership placements, one at the V&A Museum as a Cataloguer (Photographs) and the other at Collective, Edinburgh (2021). She is part of the steering committee for the School of Art and Humanities Open Research Network Speaking of Her and on the Advisory Board for the RSE Network Women Make Cities. In 2019 she co-organised Speaking With - a one-day event exploring voicing historical subjectivity at the Royal College of Art. She is a contributor to Photomonitor, and has worked as a tutor and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh Napier University and Stills, Edinburgh. Douglas studied Photography at Edinburgh College of Art (2006) before then completing a Master in Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art (2010). Her residencies include; Re:Create Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2008), Photography MA, School of the Art Institute Chicago (2009), AiR Fondazione Fotografia, Modena, Italy (2010), Proekt Fabrika, Moscow (2011) and Facture of Research Residency (RCA), University of Cumbria (2018). In 2017, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews.

Douglas was the recipient of the 9th Helen Keller International Award for her work Playboy Entertainment for Men in 2011. She worked with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for An Attendant's Portrait in 2015 and was represented by Stills Gallery at Edinburgh Art Fair and published in Uncertain States for her work Zero Hours Creativity in 2015. Her work was recognised with a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award in 2016 and she was the 2020 recipient of the Andrew Wyld Research Support Grant, Paul Mellon Centre.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues including: Galerie Huit, Rencontres d'Arles International Photography Festival; Stills Gallery, Edinburgh; Columbia University, New York; Brighton Photo Fringe; Format Festival; PHOTOUKINDIA; The Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award; Asylum & Assembly Point; Royal College of Art Research Show; and St Andrews Photography Festival.

For more information:

www.carolinedouglasphotography.co.uk


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Feb 18, 202243:30
Photography Down The Line with Marilyn Stafford (recorded: 9 November 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Marilyn Stafford (recorded: 9 November 2021)

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 Rolleiflex camera by a friend. To support herself in between acting roles, she found work assisting US fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo. Her photographic career was formally launched in Autumn 1948 when she took her first portrait of Albert Einstein for friends who were making a documentary film about him. She was given a 35mm SLR camera for the first time and a quick lesson in how to use it in the back of the car on the way to his house in New Jersey.

From the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Stafford accumulated a large and eclectic body of work spanning fashion and street photography, photojournalism and social documentary photography. She has taken portraits of many famous and influential figures including: Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Indira Gandhi, Carlo Levi, Italo Calvino, Sir Richard Attenborough, Sir Alan Bates, Le Corbusier, Jean Seberg, Lee Marvin, Joanna Lumley and Twiggy. Her work has led her around the globe from her native US, particularly to France, England, Italy, Lebanon, India and Bangladesh.

During the 1960s, Stafford worked as a freelance photographer for The Observer, Vogue (UK) and many other international newspapers and magazines. She was one of very few women to be doing that kind of work at the time. In the early 1970s, she spent time photographing Indira Gandhi, India’s first and only woman prime minister, around the time of India’s war with Pakistan.
The photographs offer a powerful and personal insight into Indira Gandhi’s daily life, not only as a beloved stateswoman but also as a mother and grandmother.

In 2017, Stafford set up the Marilyn Stafford Fotoreportage Award in collaboration with FotoDocument. The award is supported by Nikon, UK and is a social documentary photography award for women that focuses on positive solutions to social or environmental issues. In 2020, Stafford was awarded the Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Picture Editors' Guild. Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, the first comprehensive book on Stafford’s work, was published by Bluecoat Press in October 2021. A retrospective exhibition of her photographs will be held at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery from 22 February-8 May 2022.

Marilyn would like to thank her daughter, Lina Clerke, and Nina Emett, director of FotoDocument.

Further information:

www.marilynstaffordphotography.com

www.fotodocument.org


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Jan 31, 202257:26
Photography Down The Line with Alex Boyd (recorded: 4 June 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Alex Boyd (recorded: 4 June 2020)

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 practice-based PhD in photography. His work is held in several national collections including the Scottish National Galleries, V&A, and The Royal Scottish Academy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and the National Library of Scotland. 

www.alexboydphotography.com

@studioalexboyd (instagram)

@AlexBoyd (twitter)

Nov 05, 202146:19
Photography Down The Line with Stephen Koch, Director of The Peter Hujar Archive (recorded: 7 September 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Stephen Koch, Director of The Peter Hujar Archive (recorded: 7 September 2021)

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 cultural scene. One of his books, Stargazer – The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol, is now regarded as a classic discussion of Warhol’s films, art and sensibility. Before Peter Hujar died as a victim of the AIDS pandemic, he named Koch as the executor of his entire artistic estate.

Peter Hujar (born 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.


For more information:

'The Pictures. Securing Peter Hujar's place among the greats' by Stephen Koch was published in the May 2018 edition of Harper's magazine. Available to read at www.harpers.org

www.peterhujararchive.com

www.stephenkochauthor.com


Image: Blanket, 1985 ©️The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Sep 17, 202157:15
Photography Down The Line with Rosy Martin (recorded: 24 August 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Rosy Martin (recorded: 24 August 2021)

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 with the late Jo Spence, she evolved and developed a new photographic practice- phototherapy - incorporating re-enactments. Through embodiment, they explored the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. Her ‘therapeutic gaze’ provides a safe space for exploring one’s own stories in profoundly innovative ways.

Exhibiting Internationally and publishing widely since 1985, she has investigated issues including gender, sexuality, ageing, class, location, shame and family dynamics. Her photographic practice is grounded in research, the subjects arise from personal lived experiences, yet communicate to a broad audience. For example in ‘Transforming the suit: what does a lesbian look like?’ 1987 she played with different historical and contemporary stereotypes to challenge simplistic assumptions.

She used still life and video in ‘Too close to home?’ to explore the experiences of pre-bereavement, loss, grief and reparation by focusing upon her childhood home as a metaphor/metonym for both her father and mother, anticipating and mourning their deaths. She researched working-class suburban life inspired by this semi-detached house, almost unchanged since the 1930s. In ‘The end of the line’ she photographed through tears a soft and melancholy goodbye to her roots.

On turning fifty, her focus became contesting the dominant representations of ageing women, a subject she has returned to in her seventies. Using humour, play and parody the ageing body is reconfigured as present, joyous and defiant.

Martin has run intensive experiential phototherapy workshops and given lectures in Universities and Galleries throughout Britain, the USA, Canada, Eire and Finland. She also ran workshops in community settings, including a women's prison, projects with survivors of sexual abuse and school-based projects on digital identities. She held lecturing posts in photographic theory, art history and visual culture at Universities in UK.

@rosymartin5 (Instagram)

www.rosymartin.info

www.rosymartin.co.uk

www.outrageousagers.co.uk

www.gravitygravitas.com


Aug 27, 202156:16
Photography Down The Line with Chris Leslie (recorded: 27 July 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Chris Leslie (recorded: 27 July 2021)

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 Africa and Eastern Europe. In 2005 he went freelance as a documentary photographer and filmmaker and founded Journey Productions –  an independent video production studio producing films and photography for corporate and third sector clients.

Leslie graduated from the London College of Communication in 2010 with an MA (Distinction) in Documentary Photography. As part of his final project he began documenting his home city of Glasgow, following the stories of the people on the frontline of demolition and regeneration. This documentation continued after his MA and resulted in the 2016 sold out book and multimedia project Disappearing Glasgow. This project and other projects in Glasgow established him as one of the most consistent chroniclers of the city’s recent history.

His photography and films are featured regularly in the Guardian and his photography work has been acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland as well as many private collectors. Leslie’s most recent project and book – A Balkan Journey released in 2021 takes us on a photographic journey through the towns and cities of post-conflict Former Yugoslavia in this extensive and previously unseen 24-year archive from his region.

www.chrisleslie.com

www.balkanjourney.com

@chrisleslie (Instagram)

@clesliephoto (Twitter)


Aug 13, 202145:01
Photography Down The Line with Lorna Macintyre (recorded: 27 July 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Lorna Macintyre (recorded: 27 July 2021)

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 Language or All Truths Wait in All Things, Mary Mary, Glasgow (2015); Four Paper Fugues, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, part of GENERATION, 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland (2014). Group exhibitions include: Exercises in Style,  Murano St Glasgow (part of Glasgow International 2021), Elementum, CCA Andratx, Andratx, Mallorca (2020); These Fingers Read Sideways, Fettes College, Edinburgh (2018); A Portrait of Beth Harmon, Tender Books, London (2017); Ambit: Photographies from Scotland, Stills, Edinburgh (2017); Ur Phenomenon, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland (2015); Dirt and not Copper, 221a, Vancouver (2014).

lornamacintyre.com

Lorna's recommendations included:

I Confess by Moyra Davey. Book launch with Dancing Foxes Press (streamed live on 29 October 2020 and available on YouTube)

Aug 06, 202138:53
Photography Down The Line with Sekai Machache (recorded: 16 June 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Sekai Machache (recorded: 16 June 2020)

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 psychological challenge of having African heritage whilst living in the West. She is interested in the relationship between spirituality, imagination and the role of the artist in disseminating symbolic imagery to provide a space for healing. Working in a multi-disciplinary practice, Sekai works with a wide range of media. Her photographic practice is formulated through digital studio based compositions utilising body paint and muted lighting conditions to create images that appear to emerge from darkness.
Machache works internationally with her most recent work taking her to Brazil where she produced a cross-cultural project which was supported by a Creative Scotland and British Council partnership. She often works collaboratively, for and within her community and is a founding and organising member of the Yon Afro Collective.
www.sekaimachache.com
@sekaimachache (Instagram)
www.yonafro.co.uk
Books recommended by Sekai during this episode:
Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)
White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism by Robin DiAngelo (Penguin, 2019)
In The Wake: On Blackness And Being by Christina Sharpe (Duke University Press, 2016)
The Red Book by CG Jung
Jul 30, 202136:23
Photography Down The Line with Paul Hill (recorded: 26 June 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Paul Hill (recorded: 26 June 2021)

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 photojournalist he worked for the Birmingham Post & Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, and the BBC, amongst others. He became a full-time lecturer in photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham in 1974 where he was later appointed head of the Creative Photography course, the forerunner to all current student-centred higher education courses in the medium. Another notable achievement around this time was the establishment, with his wife, Angela, of The Photographers' Place, the UK's first residential photography workshop, at their Peak District home. Between 1995 and 2010, Hill was a professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and set up the MA in Photography course in 1996, which was the first in Britain. A former member of the Arts Council’s first photography committee in the 1970s, he helped set up the Derby Festival of Photography in 1991 and was Director of East Midlands Arts for four years during the 1990s. Hill was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990 and, four years later, he was awarded an MBE for services to photography. Hill was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art by Derby University in 2011 and De Montfort University in 2012.

Paul Hill has exhibited regularly since 1970 throughout the British Isles, Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia and is the author of Dialogue with Photography (co-authored with Thomas Joshua Cooper), 1979/2005; Approaching Photography, (1982/2004); White Peak Dark Peak, (1990) and Corridor of Uncertainty, (2010). His work is in the art collections of, amongst others, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford; Arts Council England; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Cleveland Museum of Art in the USA. Birmingham City Archives, which houses one of the UK's major collections of photographs, acquired the Paul Hill/ Photographers' Place Archive in 2004. An exhibition of Hill's work, Prenotations Remastered, will be held at Argentea Gallery, Birmingham, UK from 17 September to 29 October 2021. 

www.hillonphotography.co.uk


Recommendations during this episode included:

How Change Happens: Photography Education and Society by May McWilliams. Published by Blurb (2020)

Approaching Photography by Paul Hill. First published in 1982. Third edition published by Routledge (2020)

Photography books (in general) published by Routledge.



Jul 02, 202101:17:42
Photography Down The Line with Crystal Bennes (recorded: 16 June 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Crystal Bennes (recorded: 16 June 2021)

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 particle physics research, feminist critiques of physics and gendered representations of nature in the history of science. She is currently working on her first photobook—exploring the relationships between atomic weapons development, computer simulations, military photography and women programmers—which will be published in April next year with The Eriskay Connection.

www.crystalbennes.com

@crystalbennes (Instagram)


Crystal's book recommendations included:

Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times by Nicole Shukin. University of Minnesota press (2009)

Find A Fallen Star: Regine Peterson. Natasha Christia (Author). Published by Kehrer Verlag (2015)

Leopold's Legacy by Oliver Leu. Published by The Eriskay Connection (2020)

Abigail Reynolds: Lost Libraries. András Szántó (Editor). Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag (2017)

Jun 18, 202152:07
Photography Down The Line with Simon Murphy (recorded: 10 June 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Simon Murphy (recorded: 10 June 2021)

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 actors including Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie and John Hurt. Murphy's ongoing project, Govanhill, is a celebration of people and community but photographed with a raw reality. A portrait of circumstance, hope and aspiration:

“The project is about community and diversity. Govanhill is not without it’s problems but it’s also a place where people come together and share culture and experience. It’s an exciting place that I love and where I have many connections.” 

To date, the images from Govanhill have only been available through a limited edition newspaper that Simon publishes and distributes free around the shops and café’s in the area:

“The idea is that to get hold of a newspaper, people have to come in to Govanhill and find one. I post clues on my Instagram page. While searching for a newspaper the individual might buy a coffee or a record, contributing a little to the local economy, or perhaps change pre conceived ideas that have been formed due to negative publicity.”

In describing his work, Murphy has said:

"My images have always been about celebrating diversity and seeing beauty in our differences. Sometimes it's important to ask yourself difficult questions and Photography has the power to trigger thoughts in people's minds that can plant the seeds for change"

For more information:

www.simonmurphyphotographer.com

@smurph77 (Instagram)


Simon's recommendations included:

Podcasts:

United Nations of Photography (see unitednationsofphotography.com)

Photographic Memory with GarçonJon

Books on:

Albert Watson

Joel Meyerowitz

See/Saw: Looking at Photographs by Geoff Dyer. Published by Canongate Books in 2021



Jun 11, 202154:16
Photography Down The Line with David Brittain (recorded: 20 May 2021)

Photography Down The Line with David Brittain (recorded: 20 May 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to David Brittain.

Since 1980 David Brittain has been engaged with photography as a writer, reviewer, editor of 'Creative Camera', documentary maker, curator and academic researcher. David wrote 'Inside Photography: Ten Interviews with Editors' (2012), 'The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi At Ambit' (2009), edited 'Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing' (2000) and has contributed many essays to journals and books including 'The Journal of Magazine Media' (2020) and 'A Companion To Photography' (2020). He is currently curating a series of exhibitions marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Photographers' Gallery.


David's reading recommendations:

Stephen Watts - Republic of Dogs/Republic of Birds

Film on the internet about Stephen Watts by Huw Wahl

Bernardette Mayer - Memory


David's listening recommendations:

Jamie Saft

Ryuchi Sakamoto

Sarah Davachi

Avisha Cohen

May 21, 202147:12
Photography Down The Line with Matthew Arthur Williams (recorded: 12 May 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Matthew Arthur Williams (recorded: 12 May 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Matthew Arthur Williams.

Matthew Arthur Williams (b. 1989 London) is a visual & sound artist, freelance photographer and DJ. Living and working in Glasgow. Matthew's work, which takes a multi-disciplinary approach, sits to continuously encourage a different narrative and is primarily interested in the documentation of black existence and resistance, specifically here in the UK. As a DJ they have coordinated multiple nightspaces in the Glasgow nightscene and is a regular host on Glasgow-based radio station, Clydebuilt Radio.

www.matthewarthurwilliams.com

Matthew's recommendations included:

'In Focus: Wendy Ewald & Noni Stacey Book Launches' from Street Level Photoworks' online event series (see www.streetlevelphotoworks.org)

'Beloved' by Toni Morrison (first published in 1987)

'London' (1994) by Patrick Keiller. Available online via the BFI player

May 14, 202142:30
Photography Down The Line with Nicky Bird (recorded: 3 May 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Nicky Bird (recorded: 3 May 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Nicky Bird.

Nicky Bird is an artist and Reader in Contemporary Photographic Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. Her current solo show Legacy at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, (27 April-6 June 2021) looks back at over fifteen years of her work.

Nicky’s work investigates the contemporary relevance of ‘found’ artefacts, their archives and specific sites through collaborative art processes with people who have significant connections to a latent history. She is interested in how such artefacts, archives and sites carry both social and personal histories. This leads to a key question: what is our relationship to the past, and what is the value we ascribe to it? She has explored this through photography, bookworks, sound, the Internet and New Media. Dialogues with archivists, archaeologists, local community members, local history groups, and museum volunteers are instrumental in her practice. This means the collaborative process, and the physical site, shape the form of final artworks.

Photographs are often the starting point for a project, and their relationship to a present-day landscape. Therefore, living memory – before it becomes ‘history’ – is an important link to all Nicky Bird’s projects, which is why the recent past is of special interest. Since 2007, the use of oral reminiscence and exploration of non-invasive archaeological methods have become embedded in her practice. While the final outcomes of her projects may take different forms (photographs for Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place, 2007-2010, projections and memory maps for Travelling the Archive, 2016, a physical model for Heritage Site, 2016), they share the themes of land and heritage, working with individuals and communities who have witnessed significant change. This means stories and memories of place, work and family life include an aspect of the ‘unmaking’ of place, whether through economic decline and/or regeneration. 

For more information:

www.nickybird.com

www.streetlevelphotoworks.org

May 07, 202140:09
Photography Down The Line with Arpita Shah (recorded: 27 April 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Arpita Shah (recorded: 27 April 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Arpita Shah.

Arpita Shah is a visual artist and educator based between Edinburgh and Eastbourne, UK. She works between photography and film exploring the fields where culture and identity meet. As an India-born artist, Shah spent an earlier part of her life living between India, Ireland and the Middle East before settling in the UK. This migratory experience is reflected in her practice, which often focuses on the notion of home, belonging and shifting cultural identities.

Her work has been exhibited across the UK and internationally, including at the Detroit Center of Contemporary Photography (2013); Tramway in Glasgow (2014); Focus Festival in Mumbai, India (2015); Chobi Mela IX in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2017); Autograph ABP in London (2018) Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow (2019) and Impressions Gallery in Bradford (2020). She is the recipient of the 2019 Light Work + Autograph ABP Artist-in-Residence programme in Syracuse NY and her work is held at the National Galleries of Scotland. Arpita is also a photography lecturer at the Open College of Arts, she also co-directs Fòcas Scotland and member of the board of trustees for Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

www.arpitashah.com

@arpitashah_ (Instagram)

Arpita's recommendations included:

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, online event series (see www.streetlevelphotoworks.org):

'Close Up: Colin Gray'

'Close Up: Margaret Mitchell'

'In Focus: Wendy Ewald & Noni Stacey Book Launches'

'Street View: Matthew Finn' at Belfast Exposed (see www.belfastexposed.org)

Trine Søndergaard, 'Nearly Now' at Gammel Holtegaard, Copenhagen (see www.glholtegaard.dk)


Apr 30, 202140:21
Photography Down The Line with Tracy Marshall-Grant (recorded: 21 April 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Tracy Marshall-Grant (recorded: 21 April 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Tracy Marshall-Grant.

Tracy is an Arts Director & Producer specialising in the production of photography exhibitions, festivals, education projects and workshops. She is currently Festival Director of Bristol Photo Festival and previously directed LOOK Photo Biennial 2019 while Director of Development at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. She was Executive Director at Belfast Exposed Gallery from 2014-18. Tracy has a rich background in the role and vitality of social archives, which inspires much of her work. She has a previous career as Director of Development for a number of international Arts organisations covering the development of work for classical music, visual arts and literature. Prior to this she had also been a Director of Campaigns for health, social welfare and education charities across UK & Ireland.

www.bristolphotofestival.org

www.northernnarratives.net

@brsphotofest (Instagram)

@BRSphotofest (Twitter)

@northernnarratives (Instagram)

@NorthernNarrat2 (Twitter)


Apr 23, 202134:17
Photography Down The Line with Louise Fedotov-Clements (recorded: 7 April 2021)
Apr 09, 202150:04
Photography Down The Line with Christina Riley from The Nature Library (recorded: 31 March 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Christina Riley from The Nature Library (recorded: 31 March 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Christina Riley from The Nature Library.

Christina Riley is an artist based on Scotland's west coast. Using photography, found objects, writing and installations, her work draws acute attention to the details of the natural world with a particular focus on the sea's edges. In 2019 she was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing and later that year started The Nature Library, a travelling library and reading space. Her photo series The Beach Today will be published by Guillemot Press in 2021.

www.thenaturelibrary.com

www.christinariley.co.uk

@thenaturelib (Instagram and Twitter)


Book, podcast and screen recommendations from Christina:

The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast (BBC Radio 4)

The Tidal Sense (BBC Radio 3)

Rachel Carson (author)

Rebecca Marr (photographer)

Frances Scott (photographer)

Holm Sound: Transmissions from Orkney

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out & Fun To Imagine

Drowned River: The Death & Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado by Mark Klett / Rebecca Solnit / Byron Wolfe

Apr 02, 202140:21
Photography Down The Line with Francis McKee (recorded: 24 March 2021)

Photography Down The Line with Francis McKee (recorded: 24 March 2021)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Francis McKee.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator based in Glasgow. His most recent books include How to Know What’s Really Happening (2017), Even the Dead Rise Up (2018) and Dark Tales (2019).

McKee has been Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow since 2006. He is a Research Fellow at The Glasgow School of Art.


https://overoverover.com/Francis-McKee

https://www.gsa.ac.uk/research/fine-art-profiles/m/mckee,-francis/

Mar 26, 202134:20
Photography Down The Line with Norman McBeath (recorded: 12 November 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Norman McBeath (recorded: 12 November 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Norman McBeath.

Norman McBeath is a photographer and printmaker who lives in Edinburgh. The National Portrait Galleries in Edinburgh and London have over seventy of his portraits in their collections. His collaborations with poets include Plan B with Paul Muldoon, The Beach with Kathleen Jamie and Simonides with Robert Crawford. Simonides was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and exhibited at Yale and the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. His latest book is Strath with Robert Crawford.

Collections which hold his work include; the British Library; the National Library of Scotland; the British Council; Harvard University and Yale Center for British Art.

www.normanmcbeath.com

@normanmcbeath (Instagram)

Nov 13, 202029:49
Photography Down The Line with Roberta McGrath (recorded: 4 November 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Roberta McGrath (recorded: 4 November 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Roberta McGrath.

Roberta McGrath writes on the history, theory and politics of photographic representation. She has worked as a lecturer and researcher at universities in the UK since the early 1980s. From 2004-15 she was Reader in Photographic Theory, History and Criticism at Edinburgh Napier University. In 2014, McGrath was awarded a research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. She has published widely and contributed to journals including: Feminist Review, The History of Photography, The Journal of Visual Communication, Portfolio, Ten:8, Variant and Source magazine. Her essay, ‘Re-viewing the Gaze’ examining the shifting theoretical and methodological terrain that has shaped understandings of the photographic gaze over the past 40 years, was published in S. Bull, (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Photography in 2020. 


Nov 06, 202043:21
Photography Down The Line with Frances Scott (recorded: 20 October 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Frances Scott (recorded: 20 October 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Frances Scott.

Frances Scott (b. 1991) is a photographer from Orkney, currently based in Glasgow. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2014, receiving first class honours alongside an award for her Critical Journal. Her work often focuses on journeys made through a landscape of personal significance, and since 2016 has been working on a long-term project to walk and document the coastlines of Orkney. Work from this series was exhibited at Stills in 'AMBIT: Photographies from Scotland' in 2019. She is a founding member of the Orkney-based Móti Collective. Her first photobook, Undertow, was published by Another Place Press in February 2020.

www.frances-scott.co.uk

@_francesscott (Instagram)

Oct 23, 202042:05
Photography Down The Line with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (recorded: 13 October 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (recorded: 13 October 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.

Finnish born Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a founder member of the Amber Film & Photography Collective. Based since 1969 in Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England the collective established Side Gallery in 1977, dedicating it to socially engaged documentary photography. She works both as a photographer and a filmmaker, her long-term projects developed as exhibitions, books, and films include Byker, Step by Step, Hoppings, Writing in the Sand, Letters to Katja, The Coal Coast, Song For Billy, Byker Revisited and Today I'm With You.

Konttinen’s photography and Amber’s films are inscribed in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register.

www.amber-online.com

@amber_sidegallery (Instagram)



Oct 14, 202041:27
Photography Down The Line with Alan Eglinton (recorded: 22 September 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Alan Eglinton (recorded: 22 September 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Alan Eglinton.

British visual artist Alan Eglinton tells his own story through his cross-disciplinary projects. His emigration to France at an early age, his wedding proposal to his South Korean partner or his working process are a few examples. His photographs and texts are very often of a poetic nature. However, he knows the risks of sentimental effusion and adds a pinch of sarcasm or self-mockery when he sees fit.
Starting from Super Limousin, an early schoolbook in which he learnt French through the juxtaposition of words and cut-out catalogue photos, the interplay of both mediums runs throughout his practice. He explores the way photographs and words may amplify and expand each other, create graphic shifts in a sequence and, ideally, contribute to an active reading of the work. When taking photos, he responds spontaneously to scenes or states of lighting amidst the flow of the everyday. A strange gravity may lie behind pictures of an apparent serenity. Alan is drawn to the photobook, one of the central mediums of his creative output. He is currently exploring its narrative possibilities by means of his collaboration with international publishers and through the workshops he runs, in the particular the Edinburgh and Glasgow photobook clubs.

www.alaneglinton.com

Instagram:

@alan_eglinton

@edinburghphotobookclub

@glasgowphotobookclub


Sep 25, 202039:24
Photography Down The Line with Alan Dimmick (recorded: 23 July 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Alan Dimmick (recorded: 23 July 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Alan Dimmick.

Alan Dimmick was born in Glasgow in 1961. He bought his first camera (a Russian Zenith) in 1977, the same year that he converted the toilets in his secondary school annex into a darkroom. He went on to study photography at Glasgow College of Building and Printing from 1979–82 and was a founding member of Glasgow Photography Group, exhibiting at their inaugural exhibition in Hillhead Library in 1988. Early works were purchased by The People’s Palace, Glasgow and Scottish Arts Council in the 1980s and he exhibited in group shows at Collins Gallery, Glasgow the Pier Art Centre, Orkney and Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, among others. His work was part of the Contemporary Camera exhibition that toured Scotland in 1983.

Since the mid 1990s Dimmick has documented the lively contemporary art and music scene of his home city, Glasgow, capturing many of the events that have shaped a significant period in Scottish culture. In recent years, his images have been included in various publications and exhibitions of his work have been held at Street Level Photoworks and the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow and Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh. He showed 25 works at SWG3 in 2019 and at Stirling University in The Pathfoot Building in 2020. In 2012, Glasgow Museums acquired a number of Dimmick’s photographs to add to their collection of contemporary Scottish Art. The book Alan Dimmick Photographs 1977-2017 was published by Stills in 2018.

www.alandimmick.com

@alandimmick (Instagram)

Jul 24, 202044:58
Photography Down The Line with Brittonie Fletcher (recorded: 15 July 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Brittonie Fletcher (recorded: 15 July 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Brittonie Fletcher.

Brittonie Fletcher (MFA) is a British-American artist, educator and curator currently based in Edinburgh. Her work of the past decade has focused on connection to place, belonging and community - often tying in politics and the personal. She is an active member of Edinburgh LoFi and the Calotype Society.

She has received awards, nominations and fellowships for her work - including the 7th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers; a nomination for the Royal Photographic Society's 100 Heroines; an Arctic Circle Fellowship; and recent sponsorship from Highland Park. She has exhibited internationally and her work has been published with Focal/Routledge Press and Random House as well as other publications online and in print. Her work can be found in collections such as the Preus Museum: Norwegian National Museum of Photography and the National Library of Scotland.

Brittonie has held teaching appointments at the Royal College of Art, London as Media Instructor and Study Abroad teaching for Maryland College of Art and Missouri University. She is current faculty at Stills Centre for Photography Edinburgh and the Penumbra Foundation in New York, USA. Her curatorial work includes being Director of ACTINIC Festival, Juror for the Art of Research Imperial Innovations competition with the Welcome Trust, and the recent exhibition Photography In Print which ran at Edinburgh Printmakers from January – March 2020.

www.brittoniefletcher.com

Recommendations made by Brittonie during the episode include:

Edinburgh Hacklab www.edinburghhacklab.com

Edinburgh LoFi www.edinburghlofi.com

Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert: Here Lies the Body, (Rock Action Records, 2018)

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2017)

Lichen Dyes: The New Source Book by Karen Diadick Casselman, (Dover Publications Inc., 2nd revised edition published in 2003)

The Science and Practice of Photography, an Elementary Textbook on the Scientific Theory and a Laboratory Manual (Classic Reprint) by John R Roebuck, (Forgotten Books, 2012)

Photography With Emulsions: A Treatise on the Theory and Practical Working of the Collodion and Gelatine Emulsion Processes (1885) by William de Wiveleslie Abney, (Kessinger Publishing, 3rd Edition, 2008)

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities), (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, (Hamish Hamilton, 2019)

Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt USA, 2019)



Jul 17, 202045:29
Photography Down The Line with Louise Mclachlan (recorded: 8 July 2020)
Jul 10, 202035:45
Photography Down The Line with Kieran Dodds (recorded 30 June 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Kieran Dodds (recorded 30 June 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kieran Dodds.

Kieran Dodds is an award-winning photographer based in Edinburgh. After reading Zoology, he trained at the Herald newspaper group in Glasgow becoming an independent photographer after picking up a string of accolades including a 1st prize World Press Photo award for his self-assigned story: The Bats of Kasanka. A Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship allowed him to complete The Third Pole, documenting Tibetan culture in flux at the source of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong rivers.

At the time of the Independence referendum, Dodds considered the myths and realities of his native Scotland. Land of Scots traces political and cultural narratives found within the country's diverse physical environments. The portrait series Gingers originated at the same time using a visual cliche to sift through assumptions of national identity but uses the trait to connect distant countries across political boundaries.

In his more recent series Hierotopia we witness a new perspective on combating the ecological crisis, charting the role of ancient ideas on the protection of rural landscapes in northern Ethiopia. The work was awarded a Sony World Photography award and has been exhibited in LA, New York, London and Edinburgh.

Dodds' work is represented by the Panos Pictures, London.

www.kierandodds.com

@kierandodds (Instagram)

Jul 03, 202033:44
Photography Down The Line with Kara Bell, Sarah Newall, Zoe Cook and Kyle Bruce from Stills Academy (recorded 24 June 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Kara Bell, Sarah Newall, Zoe Cook and Kyle Bruce from Stills Academy (recorded 24 June 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kara Bell, Sarah Newall, Zoe Cook and Kyle Bruce, some of the current Stills Academy participants.

Stills Academy runs twice a year as part of Stills School, an alternative photography school for 16—25 year olds who face barriers to accessing the arts. The Academy supports young people to develop photography skills at a pace and level that suits them. Over a 4-month period they have access to Stills' photographic production facilities to experiment and produce a new body of work for exhibition at Stills. Participants undertake exhibition visits and workshops and they attend talks from visiting artists. They are supported throughout the Academy by Stills' learning team and tutors who provide regular feedback and teach how to give and receive constructive criticism of their photographic work. The current Stills Academy students are: Kara Bell, Sarah Newall, Zoe Cook, Kyle Bruce and Zenub Fayyaz. Instagram: @stillsschool

Kara Bell is an Edinburgh based photographer and visual artist who specialises in both traditional monochromatic photography and vibrant digitally produced prints. Instagram: @dallasboycows

Sarah Newall is a Scottish photographer, based in Edinburgh. Often through portraiture, she attempts to evoke or depict an emotional state through careful consideration of creative direction, styling and accompanying text. Instagram: @shotbysrn

Zoe Cook is an artist based in Fife who focuses on portraying her emotions, as somebody with mental health conditions, through the means of photography and film. Instagram: @_zoecookart

Kyle Bruce is a Scottish creative artist from Edinburgh who has studied photography at Stills since 2019. He is interested in architecture and street photography in colour and monochrome. Instagram: @_kyle_bruce


Jun 26, 202058:30
Photography Down The Line with Wendy McMurdo (recorded: 11 June 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Wendy McMurdo (recorded: 11 June 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Wendy McMurdo.

Wendy McMurdo is an award-winning photographer who is interested in exploring the ways in which technology influences early learning. She exploits the artistic possibilities offered by scientific progress in her work and raises questions about the effect new virtual technologies have on human beings. Recent exhibitions have included; Between Realities at Färgfabriken, Stockholm Sweden (2018), Indeterminate Objects (classrooms) commissioned for the Media Wall, Photographers Gallery, London (2017). In 2018, she was named as named as one of the Hundred Heroines, an award created by the Royal Photographic Society to showcase the best of global contemporary female photographic practice. She is based in Edinburgh and is a Senior Lecturer (MA Photography) in the Institute of Photography at Falmouth University.

www.wendymcmurdo.com

Jun 12, 202032:20
Photography Down The Line with Rebecca Marr (recorded: 27 May 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Rebecca Marr (recorded: 27 May 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Rebecca Marr.

Rebecca Marr is a photographic artist born in the Highlands who lives in Orkney. She settled there after a residency over a decade ago with the Pier Arts Centre. Rebecca works across digital and analogue photography, often with the darkroom technique of photograms. Predominantly concerned with documenting the natural world, her work currently involves wild plants, sea, seaweed and clouds.

Rebecca teaches photography at Orkney UHI and has worked with the Gunnie Moberg Archive at Orkney Library & Archive. She has an ongoing collaboration with poet Valerie Gillies and has worked on several publications, most recently, Orcadia, with Mark Edmonds.

www.rebeccamarr.co.uk

May 29, 202039:51
Photography Down The Line with Mhairi Law (recorded: 27 May 2020)
May 29, 202035:10
Photography Down The Line with Chloe Dewe Mathews (recorded: 15 May 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Chloe Dewe Mathews (recorded: 15 May 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Chloe Dewe Mathews. Chloe Dewe Mathews is a photographic artist based in St Leonards on Sea, England. Her work is internationally recognized and has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the New Yorker and Le Monde. Her awards include the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, the Royal Photographic Society Vic Odden Award and the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Chloe’s first monograph, Shot at Dawn (Ivorypress) was published in 2014, and in 2018, she published In Search of Frankenstein (Kodoji Press) and Caspian: The Elements (Aperture / Peabody Press).

For more info: http://www.chloedewemathews.com @chloedewemathews (instagram)

May 15, 202039:21
Photography Down The Line with Thomas Whittle (recorded: 14 May 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Thomas Whittle (recorded: 14 May 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Thomas Whittle. Whittle’s practice encompasses photography, painting, drawing, publishing, organising and writing often bringing these mediums together. His work attempts to navigate the duality of definition, ambiguity of usefulness and diluted purpose of the quiet and unassuming two-dimensional image. The work investigates time within production as well as time suggested by materials and methods.

Recently, Whittle co-organised the exhibition IMAGE DRUM with artist Adam Shield at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019) and held the solo exhibition, I Against I: Part IIII, at Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh (2018). Whittle has curated the following exhibitions: Greetings, Mauve, Vienna (2019); These fingers read sideways, MONOMATIC, Edinburgh (2018) and RIFF, Baltic Project Space, Newcastle (2014). The twelfth edition of his ongoing project, Slide Night is due to be held at Stills in 2020. In 2016, Whittle founded Long Distance Press, a small publishing company, with artist Adam Shield. To date they have published 14 books. Recent publications include, Your Space is Only a LineMy Mate Bill Blake, and Camper Vans Deuce (all self-published) as well as Right On published by Foundation Press and Tessex? published by Image Text Ithaca Press. Whittle is founder of the curatorial project MONOMATIC, a roaming project space. He has exhibited work in Manchester, London, Worcester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Toronto, Munich, Dortmund, Vienna, Brussels, Los Angeles and Istanbul.

For more info: @thomasjwhittle (instagram)

May 15, 202041:46
Photography Down The Line with Kat Gollock and EA Hanks (recorded 6 May 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Kat Gollock and EA Hanks (recorded 6 May 2020)

This special episode is hosted by photographer, Kat Gollock, during the week in which she was due to exhibit a new body of work at Stills as part of the Projects 20 exhibition series. Gollock's guest is EA Hanks, a writer based in Los Angeles who graduated from Vassar College with a Bachelor of Arts. Hanks has written for The Awl, Jezebel, The New York Times, The Guardian, Vanity Fair and Time Magazine. She is currently at work on a book about a thing for a publisher.

May 08, 202040:21
Photography Down The Line with Robin Gillanders (recorded: 2 April 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Robin Gillanders (recorded: 2 April 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Robin Gillanders. Gillanders is former Reader in Photography at Edinburgh Napier University. He has several works in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, the V&A, London and National Portrait Gallery, London. Publications include Little Sparta, Portrait of a Garden (1998), The Photographic Portrait (2004), The Philosopher’s Garden (2004), Highland Journey: In the Spirit of Edwin Muir (2009), and A Lover’s Complaint (2016). Gillanders had a major retrospective at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh in 2017/18. He is co-edtor of Studies in Photography published by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and is one of the organisers of The Jill Todd Photographic Award.

May 07, 202025:04
Photography Down The Line with David James Grinly (recorded: 2 April 2020)

Photography Down The Line with David James Grinly (recorded: 2 April 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to David James Grinly. Grinly is an artist from Alva, Scotland. His work regards the intersections of thought, image and belief, via the photographic. He lectures in critical studies, and works as a Research Associate & Tutor at Stills.

May 07, 202022:03
Photography Down The Line with Kat Gollock (recorded 29 April 2020)

Photography Down The Line with Kat Gollock (recorded 29 April 2020)

Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Kat Gollock during the week in which she was due to launch a new body of work at Stills as part of the Projects 20 exhibition series. Gollock was recently awarded the Jill Todd Photographic Award Bursary 2019-20. She has been working as a photographer, predominantly of portraiture, events and live performance, since graduating from Edinburgh Napier University with 1st Class Honours in 2011. She teaches photography, is an exhibited photographic artist and is a published writer on the subject. Her creative work focuses predominantly on landscape where she often incorporates text to compliment and enhance the images. Her work is often made in response to her own experiences and the environment around her, drawing on experiences of growing up a in a rural area but, now, being hugely embedded in city culture. Gollock uses her practice as a way to try and understand where she's come from and where she's going and how that fits into the world around her.

For more info: www.katgollock.com

May 01, 202039:10