Real Photo Show with Michael Chovan-Dalton

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer, pilot, and podcaster Matt Jacob joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about making work that explores personal challenges and his love of meeting people and always learning through his very popular MOOD Podcast.

https://www.mattjacob.co/

https://www.mattjacob.co/the-mood-podcast

https://www.instagram.com/mattyj_ay/

https://www.instagram.com/the_moodpodcast/

Matt Jacob is a photographer, filmmaker, and podcast host whose work explores the fragile relationship between the natural world, human presence, and the cultural systems that bind the two. He explores the intersection of culture, identity and the inner life of humans through long-form post-documentary photography, thoughtful conversations on ‘The MOOD Podcast’, and immersive creative photography experiences. His work champions depth, ethical storytelling and slow creativity in a world increasingly driven by speed and performance.

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Lisa Jayne Cramer joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about some very personal work involving relationship, grief, and reconciliation.

This work has recently been recognized through the inaugural Ephemere Photobook Grant in 2026 and is scheduled to be published by Ephemere Tokyo in October 2026.

https://www.lisajaynecramer.com

https://www.instagram.com/lisajaynecramer/

Lisa Jayne Cramer is an Australian photographer based in Melbourne/Naarm.

For as long as she can remember, she has felt most at peace holding a camera. Drawn to analogue photography and performative self-portraiture, she found a way to express how she experiences and understands the world.

Cramer’s photographic practice is a deeply personal enquiry into love, longing, grief and beauty. Drawing upon qualities of abstract expressionism, she explores the constant presence of absence through collage, performative imagery and metaphor. Flowers, particularly roses and lilies, recur throughout her work as symbols of fertility, decay, femininity and resilience, becoming vessels for both beauty and sorrow.

Her photographs have been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, including in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the United States and Japan. Her work is held in private collections across Australia, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico. She has been published in FotoNostrum Magazine (Barcelona, 2024) and Eyes on the World (Kamira Institute, Paris, 2025).

Cramer is a proud alumna of the 2025 Long Term Program: The Photobook at Penumbra Foundation, New York, through which she developed her first photobook, FLOWER under ether. The artist-produced edition was completed in December 2025 and is held in the permanent collection of State Library Victoria.

In 2026, FLOWER under ether was awarded the inaugural Ephemere Photobook Grant. A new Japan-produced edition is currently being developed in collaboration with Ephemere Tokyo, with publication planned for October 2026. Cramer was also selected to participate in Chico Review in Montana, USA, in 2026.

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Bill Ellis joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about his series, Tiger Has Loved.

Bill Ellis is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY and attended school at Ringling College of Art and Design. His series, Tiger Has Loved is centered on his relationships, particularly with his then fiancé and now spouse.

https://billellisii.com

https://www.instagram.com/billellisii/

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

No Invite: Ten Years of Capturing Fashion Week by Any Means Necessary

A Retrospective by Dan Bassini

Recorded live at the JKC Gallery.

No Invite is a series focused on capturing Fashion Week by any means necessary. With a lifelong interest in fashion, and no connection to the industry, Bassini set out to shoot the beauty and chaos the only way he knew how. Sneaking into parties, subverting security, and hitting the streets. Shot entirely on 35mm compact cameras, No Invite is a unique look into the fashion world, even when your name isn’t on the guest list.

https://www.danbassini.com/no-invite

https://www.instagram.com/danbassini

Dan Bassini is a photographer based in Jersey City, NJ specializing in digital and analog photography.

He is an alum of Mercer County Community College.

He has released thirteen books within the “No Invite” series, as well as four non-portraiture books: Highway Hypnosis, Cruel Summer, I STILL FEEL IT, and most recently When I Kill God I Will Find The Spigot From Which He Meters Out Grace And Smash It Permanently Open.

His work has been featured in many solo and group shows in the New York City area.

Dan Bassini’s work builds builds upon the legacy of the photographer, Bill Cunningham, the former fashion street photographer for the New York Times, but Bassini’s work comes from a different perspective, not from the invited insider as Cunningham was, but from the not-invited outsider. There’s a sense of chance meeting and serendipitous encounters to his work because his approach to accessing these places and encountering the invited guests is also filled with chance and serendipity.

Recently, Bassini’s work has been featured in Vogue Türkiye and on CNN.

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club - Begin Building your dream photobook library today at:

https://charcoalbookclub.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Writer and artist Donna Gordon joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about her series that reimagines Eve in the Garden.

Donna Gordon is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based writer and artist. She graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a PEN Discovery, and a Ploughshares Discovery. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, Regal House 2022, received a starred review from Kirkus Review and was named among the 100 best Indie novels of 2023, having been described as, “A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.” The novel also received the 2022 Whirling Prose Prize from Etchings Press, and was the November pick for the Brown Book Club of Boston. It was named by the Independent Book Review as one of the top 45 they’re excited about for 2022. Nina McLaughlin wrote in a Boston Globe review: “Gordon’s prose is lively; it rushes along with verve, humor, and heart…[She has] achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death and love and a page-turning adventure.” She received the 2018 New Letters Publication Award for her short story, “Primates,” and has published fiction, poetry, and essays nationally.

Gordon is also a visual artist, with a focus on photography and printmaking. She received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice award for a portrait, and was finalist for portrait series. She received the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, winner in portrait series and alternative process, and honorable mention for women seen by women and landscape series. Her work has been featured in both Shots Magazine and The Hand and has been shown in both solo and group shows at the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, ArtsWorcester, Providence Art Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Galatea Fine Art, Concord Art Association, George Marshall Store Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Featherstone Gallery, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Attleboro Art Museum, and Cambridge Art Association. Her work with former political prisoners culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. She’s represented by Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

https://donnasgordon.com

https://www.instagram.com/donnagordon8994/

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Stuart Thurlkill joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about his photographs of a famous river corridor in Montana. Thurlkill also has some great insight into how the photo review process can be most beneficial.

Stuart Thurlkill’s work exists at the intersection of observation and intuition. An award-winning filmmaker and photographer, he does not merely capture a subject; he unearths the quiet dialogue between heart and head. His documentary roots provide a foundation of truth, yet his lens often seeks the shadows where nature, community and industry converge in unexpected ways. Whether freezing a fleeting moment in the wild or the stillness of a portrait, Thurlkill invites us to witness the world as it is felt, a lingering presence in a restless world.

https://www.stuartthurlkill.com

https://www.instagram.com/stuartthurlkill/

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Chris Muth joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about his landscape work and processing the varying critiques he received.

My name is Chris Muth. I have been a photographer for over 12 years, exploring many different styles and disciplines within the medium, as you may be able to tell. I received my education in filmmaking, and have been photographing, originally, as a way to practice cinematography without a crew and equipment. It has now taken over my creative interest, really since I went to college.

For the past few years, I have focused on the land around me, trying to find something within it that I cannot find through other photographic work about the subject. I have been working on a project titled Everywhere You Have Ever Been for about 5 years now, and am going to complete it before this next spring. This project is concerned with exploring our connection to the natural world by exploring the hostility between us. This website will serve as a constantly evolving catalog of that project, as well as a showcase of my previous commercial and creative work.

Feel free to contact me for any freelance opportunities, I am open for business! I would love to assist on any projects, and help support a vision!

Contact: [email protected]

https://www.chrismuthphoto.com

https://www.instagram.com/sirhchtum/

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

JOHN BAER: THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY / A MEMOIR IN PHOTOGRAPHS 1945–1954

Andrew Baer and Megan Moynihan join Michael Chovan-Dalton to celebrate the release of John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary / A Memoir in Photographs 1945-1954, A Paper Cinema Edition, published by the John Baer Archive. This is, true to its title, an extraordinary collection of the never before published life work of John Baer, Andrew Baer's father. It's also a conversation about how wonderful a collaboration can be between family and professionals such as famed designer Yolanda Cuomo and her team, Alexa Dilworth and Jonno Rattman, Steve Smith at RISD, and Eric Luden at Digital Silver Imaging, who all believe in the work.

https://www.johnbaerarchive.com

https://www.instagram.com/johnbaerarchive/

https://www.instagram.com/yolandacuomodesign/

JOHN BAER (1920-1994)

In 1945, while serving in the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, John Baer acquired a Leica camera from a captured German soldier. His first photographs were of his fellow soldiers, weary from war.

Soon after the war John and his wife Louise moved to New York City, rented an apartment in the East Village, and connected with a community of artists and writers.

In 1950 they journeyed to France and spent the next year living in Montpellier and traveling throughout Postwar Europe. John’s photographs capture a world struggling to understand itself following years of war and political realignment.

In 1951 John and Louise returned to New York and their apartment in the East Village. John walked the streets, taking pictures that provide glimpses of ordinary people in the unguarded moments of their lives—at work, at rest, at play. He developed negatives and made prints in a make-shift darkroom in the bathroom of their fifth floor walk-up.

Sometime in the mid-1950s, John stowed his photographic life away. After his death, in 1994, his son Andrew found boxes containing thousands of negatives and prints from between 1945 and 1954. For 27 years the boxes moved whenever Andrew did. Finally, in 2021, Andrew and his wife Megan Moynihan dove into the boxes to see what stories they held. Stories of Europe emerging from the darkness of war. Stories of New York City brimming with the optimism of the early 1950s. Stories of a generation and stories of John Baer, seen through the lens of his Leica.

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club - Begin Building your dream photobook library today at:

https://charcoalbookclub.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Katerina Kouzmitcheva joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about her work, Butter Melts at 36.6°C, which weaves together political, social, and psychological ideas that create a portrait of her life and the lives of the people she encounters.

https://katerinakouzmitcheva.com

https://www.instagram.com/katerina_kouzmitcheva/

Katerina Kouzmitcheva is a Polish photographer of Belarusian origin based in Wrocław, Poland. Working at the intersection of documentary and art photography, she explores how visible and invisible boundaries—geographical, ideological, and psychological—shape individual lives and collective attitudes. Her work focuses on migration, systems of control, memory, gender, and identity, while also turning inward—to vulnerability, femininity, and the emotional experience of loss—moving between the personal and the political.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Law, graduated from the Academy of Documentary and Art Photography “Fotografika” in St. Petersburg, and earned both her Master’s and PhD degrees in Fine Arts from the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. She is currently continuing her studies at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic.

She is a winner of international photography competitions including TIFA, BIFA, and the Urbanautica Institute Awards, and a recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Katerina is a member of the international photojournalist collective Women Photograph. Her work has been exhibited in Arles, as well as in Brazil, Japan, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Her photography has been featured in publications including British Journal of Photography, Bird in Flight, Monovisions, and Dodho, among others.

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer, educator, and editor, Andrea Birnbaum joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about her work and limited edition book, Spilt Milk.

"Spilt Milk is about family, memory, and what is handed down through generations. I am using family photographs and other items to construct images, exploring how certain behaviors have affected the family dynamic. Through this project, I am re-evaluating my personal history and altering my perspective with the newly acquired knowledge."

https://www.andreabirnbaum.com

https://www.andreabirnbaum.com/books/spilt-milk-limited-edition

https://www.instagram.com/andreabirnbaumphoto

Andrea Birnbaum is a social documentary photographer and educator. Her work as a freelance photographer spans many genres, including editorial, corporate, non-profit and portraiture for more than twenty years. She holds an MFA in Media Arts from Maine Media College in Rockport, Maine.

Recent exhibitions include:

2025 Family, Community and Belonging, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

2024 Re-examining the Family Tree, Photographic Nights of Selma, Selma, Alabama

2021 Once Upon a Time, Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston, MA

2021 Memory, juried by Fran Forman, SE Center for Photography, Greenville, SC

2021 A Woman’s View, juried by Elinor Carucci, SE Center for Photography, Greenville, SC

2021 Julia Margaret Cameron and Pollux Exhibitio, FotoNostrum, Barcelona, Spain

2020 You Can Always See The Sun, Photographic Nights of Selma, Selma, Alabama

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club

Begin Building your dream photobook library today at

https://charcoalbookclub.com

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com

https://www.charcoalworkshops.com