Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Oliver Raymond Barker.

Oliver Raymond Barker works with the mechanics and alchemy of photography to make images, objects and structures that expand upon what photography is and can be. Working predominantly with alternative analogue techniques he uses photography as a tool to uncover imagined narratives & unseen processes, framed by his interest in culture, ecology and spirituality. His first book Trinity has recently been published by the award winning photo book publisher Loose Joints.

https://oliverraymondbarker.co.uk

https://loosejoints.biz/collections/current-titles/products/trinity (Trinity book)

@oliverraymondbarker (Instagram)

Mentions by Oliver Raymond Barker in this episode included:

Robert MacFarlane (writer) and his books such as Landmarks and Underlay

The Dark Mountain Project: https://dark-mountain.net

Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography, and exhibition (with publication) held at the V&A, London in 2010-11 and organised by Martin Barnes

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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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Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Ada Trillo.

Ada Trillo is a Philadelphia-based photographer. Born and raised in the U.S/ Mexican border region of Juarez and El Paso, her work focuses on sex trafficking, climate and violence-related international migration, and long-standing barriers of race and class. Her projects have been featured in international publications including The Guardian, Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine, and Mother Jones. Trillo’s work is held in the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutional and private collections. Her many awards include a First Place in the Tokyo International Foto Awards (2019), a British Journal of Photography Female In Focus Best Series Award and The Me & Eve Grant from the Center of Photographic Arts in Santa Fe (2020). Trillo’s images have been exhibited in the US, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, England, France, and Germany. She holds degrees from the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, and Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 2021 she was accepted into Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism in the International Center of Photography in New York.

To enquire about making a financial donation to the aid initiative in Ukraine that Ada mentions in the episode, please contact: [email protected] Ada has also recommended that donations are made to The Red Cross.

@adatrillophotography (Instagram)

www.adatrillo.com

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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.

www.oanastanciu.com

@oana.asta (Instagram)

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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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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.

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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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)

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

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.

@rosymartin5 (Instagram)

www.rosymartin.info

www.rosymartin.co.uk

www.outrageousagers.co.uk

www.gravitygravitas.com

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)