A personal, disorganised and decidedly non-comprehensive flavour of the recent photographic shenanigans here in London over the past few days at the second annual Photo London trade fair and at Offprint London, one of a number of satellite events organised around it.

Ed Thompson is a British photographer, artist and lecturer. His own photographic work has focused on various subjects over the years from environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures and the consequences of war and his documentary photo-essays have been published in international magazines including National Geographic, Newsweek Japan and the Guardian Weekend Magazine. In 2007 he studied the Master's Degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication for which he received a first class distinction. In the spring of 2013 Ed started Punktum which evolved into The School of Punktum where leading photographers and lecturers from various London Universities teach month long courses on documentary photography to intimate 10 person classed from as little as £100. There are also free portfolio reviews. It’s a brilliant idea and Ed explains how it came about in the interview.

Laura El-Tantawy was born in Worcestershire, England to Egyptian parents and spent her childhood and early years in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the USA. Her photography, perhaps inevitably, is inspired by questions on her identity - exploring social and environmental issues pertaining to her background. In 2002, she started her career as a newspaper photographer in the USA with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and then the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. In 2006, she went freelance to pursue personal projects. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia with dual degrees in journalism and political science. She also has an MA in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminster as well as a Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Last year, in 2015, Laura published her first photobook, In The Shadow Of The Pyramids, a first person account exploring memory and identity which began in 2005 when she returned to Egypt out of a desire to reconnect with a country she felt she no longer knew in order to explore the essence of Egyptian identity in the hope of coming to terms with her own. The book was critically acclaimed and led to Laura being nominated for the 2016 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize for which she is one of the four finalists. All 500 copies have sold out but you can still get yourself one the limited special editions, available from her website (link below) at £250. Not cheap, but an investment! In episode 26, Laura discusses: Formative experiences - Saudi & USA; discovering photography; a training in newspapers; having a day job; the origins of In The Shadow Of The Pyramids; a secret revealed: Cloudy mode!; visual literacy among the general population and the succes of the book

Edmund Clark is an award-winning artist interested in linking history, politics and representation. His work traces ideas of shared humanity, otherness and unseen experience through landscape, architecture and the documents, possessions and environments of subjects of political tension. The series Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out, Letters to Omar and Control Order House, all of which have been published as books, engage with state censorship to explore the hidden experiences and spaces of control and incarceration in the ‘Global War on Terror’, as does Edmunds latest book, co-authored by counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition. His other book, The Mountains of Majeed, reflects on the end of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Edmund’s work has been acquired for national and international collections including, in Britain, The National Portrait Gallery, The National Media Museum and The Imperial War Museum, London where he is currently preparing for the opening of a major, year-long exhibition, which he talks briefly about in the interview. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet on the theme of Power and being twice nominated for the Deutsche Borse Prize. He teaches postgraduate students at the University of the Arts London, contributes regularly to international conferences and symposia, and is actively engaged with education through lectures, talks, workshops and portfolio reviews.

Sophie Ebrard was pursuing a very successful career in advertising until 6 years ago when, creatively frustrated, she decided to leave it all behind, start calling herself a photographer and pursue her passion for taking pictures. She happily admits that she barely knew anything about photography at that stage but she set about learning the ropes and building a portfolio and in the relatively short time since then she has found considerable success as a commercial photographer, having been commissioned to shoot numerous high-profile advertising campaigns. Simultaneously, she has worked on her own personal projects, the best known of which is undoubtedly “It’s Just Love”, whereby over a four year period, she explored the world of adult entertainment, shooting the action both in front of the camera and behind the scenes on porn film sets all over the world. The work has been widely published and was featured at the Unseen festival in Amsterdam in 2015, as a solo exhibition that - for reasons she explains in the interview - was held in Sophie’s own house. In Episode 24, Sophie discusses: the transition from advertising; her film-based working procees; swinger party etiquette; finding the beauty in the every day and the 'It’s Just Love' project.

Murray Ballard embarked on a degree in furniture and product design before realising that learning about the chemical properties of plastic held little interest for him. At this point he jumped ship and switched to an art foundation course where he duly discovered something much more exciting. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a degree in Photography. The following year he was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 08 – the annual showcase of work by the ‘most promising recent graduates’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. In 2011 the British Journal of Photography recognised him as an ‘emerging photographer of note’, following his debut solo show at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, The Prospect of Immortality, which took as its subject the strange, marginal world of cryonics: the process of storing a dead body by freezing it until science has advanced to such a degree that it is able to bring that person back to life. Immediately after leaving college, Murray got the job of assisting Magnum photographer Mark Power, a role which he stayed in until quite recently. During those past ten years he has taken on his own commissions, worked on his own personal projects and continued his cryonics story - which he had first began while he still studying after coming across a curious news story in The Guardian. Exactly a decade later the book of that project has just been published by GOST books. Murray's photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, FT Weekend, GEO, GQ, The Guardian, The Independent and Wired. In episode 23, Murray Discusses: Early times doing "bad Jeff Walls"; a turning point - Alec Soth, Sleeping By The Mississippi; early influence: sci-fi movies; learing about "picture making" with Mark Power; the unlikely origins of his cryonics project; the Prospect of Immortality; working with GOST on the book

Jack Latham is a freelance photographer, born and raised in Wales, now living and working in Brighton on the south coast of England. He graduated from the Documentary Photography course at Newport University, South Wales in 2012. His work is presented in a mixture of large format photography and digital film making and has been realised in several self-published books. Jack has exhibited internationally and in December 2015, was the recipient of the Bar Tur Photobook Award for his recent work titled 'Sugar Paper Theories'. In addition to his own photographic practice, Jack co-curates the Miniclick event series in Brighton. He is also a founding member and continuing contributor to the Welsh photography collective A Fine Beginning which has been exhibiting across the UK through out 2013-2016. Jack also runs an in house printing company called DiveBar.

Inspired by a cool photography teacher and her cupboard full of photobooks, Kate Peters started taking pictures at school and has never really wanted to do anything else since. Whilst doing a photography degree at Falmouth College of Arts she responded to a notice offering work experience with Nadav Kander, which she got and that led to what I guess would be some people’s idea of a dream apprenticeship - a full time assisting job with Nadav that lasted four years. After striking out on her own she quite quickly established herself as an editorial portrait photographer, a profile which was helped when in 2012 she was commissioned by the Guardian Weekend Magazine to photograph 32 of the UK’s Olympic hopefulls, which became a cover story. Her portrait of Julian Assange also ended up on the cover of Time. She has also worked on a number of personal projects including Yes Mistress, a portrait series about the world of the dominatrix and Cam Girls, which features images of sex workers taken from the computer screen, both of which she discusses in the interview. She has won a number of accolades including the Vic Odden award in 2013 and the Freshfields Prize at the Renaissance Awards and a selection of her portraits form part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait gallery in London. In episode 21, Kate discusses: Concerns brought on by motherhood; assisting Nadav Kander; not being in a hurry; the Yes Mistress project; CamGirls; editorial commissions - her process; shooting women & shooting film; book recomendatations; fear of the unknown

After taking a degree in Fine Art at Oxford University, Chloe Dewe Mathews worked in the film industry for four years before making the switch to photography. In a relatively short period of time she established herself as a one of those young talents to watch. Her subject matter has been diverse, from holidaying Hasidic Jews at the Welsh seaside to Uzbek gravediggers on the Caspian coast. In 2010 she spent nine months travelling extensively around China and the Caspian Sea region of central Asia where she worked on stories on the indiginous Uighur population of Xingiang in western China, the ecological disaster that is the Aral sea, and the rapidly developing, oil rich country of Azerbaijhan. More recently Chloe was commissioned by her alma mater, Ruskin College of Art, Oxford, to produce a body of work that would mark the centenary of the First World War. The resulting project, Shot At Dawn, explores the sombre, often overlooked and sometimes controversial subject of the one thousand British, French and Belgian soldiers who were executed by firing squad for cowardice or dissertion between 1914 and 1918. The images she made, of the exact locations of some of these executions, as well as being extensively exhibited, became Chloe's first book, published by Ivorypress. In 2014 she was awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University's Peabody Museum which will eventually result in a book of her work from the Caspian Sea. Chloe has also been awarded the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award, the Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award by the Magenta Foundation and the BJP International Photography Award. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. In episode 020, Chloe discusses: From fine art to the movie business; the transition to photography; a trip through central Asia; being self critical; photo book recommendation: Sequester by Awoiska Van Der Molen; her ongoing project about the River Thames

Lydia Goldblatt trained at the London College of Communications, receiving a Masters Degree in Photography with Distinction in 2006. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, with group and solo shows in the UK, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Greece, China and Malaysia. Her long term project, Still Here, which she worked on over a three year period, featured images of her parents and focussed mainly on the subject of her elderly father’s mortality, stemming, as she puts it, "from a desire to address the inevitable changes wrought by his approaching death." It was published as a book by Hatje Canz in 2013 and has also been shown in various international exhibitions. If you’re not familiar with the work, you can see a selection of images from the series at lydiagoldblatt.com. Alongside such personal projects, her editorial work has appeared in a variety of magazines including those of the Guardian, Sunday Times and Telegraph newspapers. In 2010 she was nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize, and in 2011 was awarded the Fundacion Botin Residency Award with Paul Graham. More recently she was the recipient of the Magenta Flash Forward Award and International Jewish Artist of the Year award and she is currently on a one year artist residency in London, where she lives.