In episode 216 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on photographs as memories of lives lived and lost, and reducing the pressure on making work.

Plus this week photographer Mickey Smith takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’

Mickey Smith is an American conceptual artist who now lives in New Zealand who holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Photography from Minnesota State University Moorhead and a Diploma in Jewellery Design from Hungry Creek Art & Craft School in New Zealand. As a photographer, her practice over the last twenty years has been engaged with a longstanding inquiry into libraries, books and archives — in particular the social significance of their physical existence or disappearance. Smith has exhibited throughout the United States, in China, Russia and New Zealand and her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art Library, Sheldon Museum of Art and Weisman Art Museum. She has also received awards from the McKnight Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, Americans for the Arts and Creative New Zealand. Her first artist’s book, Denudation, was included in the photo book installation, A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial in 2012. In 2018, her second book was published titled As You Will... Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific, a book focused on the 25 Carnegie libraries erected in New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. Two bodies of her work Matters of Time and New Outlook, have been exhibited at the Sanderson Contemporary, New Zealand. www.mickeysmith.com

Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019).

© Grant Scott 2022