A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers

Christina Assi is a Lebanese photojournalist and photo editor. After losing a leg in an Israeli tank attack in southern Lebanon in October 2023, she began campaigning for journalists' safety.

Christina was born in Lebanon. Growing up there in the 1990s, she lived through the instability of the civil war that she documented in multiple stories. In 2005 she moved to Doha, capital city of Qatar, with her family.  Christina graduated from the Notre Dame University-Louaize in Lebanon with a bachelor's degree in communications and journalism. In 2018, she began to work for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Cyprus as a p...

Reuben Wu is a multidisciplinary artist who explores new ways of telling compelling stories about the world we inhabit. 

His work with aerial lighting and long-exposure photography has defined a singular style in contemporary landscape photography and belongs in the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the MoMA.

His practice spans fine art and creative collaborations with brands.

Reuben was born in Liverpool to parents who had immigrated from Hong Kong. Following their guidance, he pursued Industrial Design at university, though his academic focus often took a backseat to DJing, collecting r...

Iva Sidash is an independent documentary photographer and visual storyteller from Ukraine. Born in 1995, she focuses on deeply personal narratives shaped by the realities of war. Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she has documented intimate stories of fragility, resistance, and memory that unfold behind the frontlines.

Her work merges artistic sensibility with documentary practice, revealing the human experience through a lens of emotion, nuance, and resilience.

A graduate of the International Center of Photography in New York, Iva is a member of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers and Women Photograph. She is...

Ian Berry was born in 1934 in Lancashire, England. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, and his photographs were used in the trial to prove the victims' innocence.

Henri Cartier-Bresson invited Ian to join Magnum in 1962, when he was based in Paris. He moved to London in 1964 to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. Since then assignments have taken him around the world: he has documented Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia...

Richard Sharum is an editorial and documentary photographer based in upstate New York.  Mainly focusing on socio-economic or social justice dilemmas concerning the human condition, his work has been regarded as in-depth, up-close and personal.  

Selected exhibitions have occurred in Kyoto, Japan, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Reggio Emilia, Italy, New York City, Boston, Chicago and Dallas, and his work has been added to the permanent collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and The Wittliff Collection, as well as others.

Richard's commissions include those by The Meadows Foundation, Centers for Community Cooperation, Harvard Law School, Stu...

Clémentine Schneidermann is a French photographer living and working between Paris and South Wales. She recently completed a practice-based PhD at the University of South Wales, Cardiff entitled Photographing Children in a Social Context: Narratives and Strategies (2021). Clémentine works on long term projects & commissions and is interested in new creative practices in social documentary photography. Her approach is collaborative and playful, with an interest in communities and childhood, as well as our relationship to identity and culture. She is a co-founder of Bleak Fabulous with Charlotte James, a  photography-based creative studio working across different disciplines with an emp...

Aria Shahrokhshahi (b. 1996) is a British-Iranian multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice has been shaped by a deep fascination with the intricate dynamics of diverse communities and the complexities of the human condition. With a focus on social structures and the human experience, Shahrokhshahi's work serves as a critical exploration of the relationships and power dynamics that inform everyday life.

Aria’s debut photobook, Wet Ground, featuring images from Ukraine shot over a period of several years both before and after the Russian invasion in Feburary 2022, was published in April 2026 by Loose Joints.

He is currently putting the...

Lorenzo Meloni is an Italian photographer.

He has documented some of the defining conflicts of the 21st century across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. For more than a decade, he has worked in territories marked by wars, revolutions and profound political and social transformations, developing a visual practice that views conflict not merely as an event, but as a historical, material and cultural process.

In recent years, his work has expanded beyond the battlefield. Revelation, an ongoing project, explores how science and technology are changing our relationship to the material world.

I...

Ximena Borrazás is a Uruguayan photographer and documentary filmmaker born in Montevideo in 1992. She focuses on armed conflicts, migration, and humanitarian crises. Her work combines visual sensitivity with a strong commitment to social justice, often addressing the experiences of women and displaced populations.

She has published with major international outlets, including National Geographic, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, DW, France 24, Al Jazeera, and the Associated Press, and has worked with institutions such as UNHCR, UNESCO, and IOM.

Ximena’s project in northern Ethiopia documents the devastating aftermath of the Tigray conflict, one of the deadliest war...

Sam Faulkner is a London-based photographer and the founder of Print Swap, an iOS app. where photographers and visual artists exchange gallery-quality physical prints directly. No buying, no selling, no follower counts.

Sam came to photography the hard way, travelling into Afghanistan in 1994 with a battered Canon, a few rolls of film and very little plan. His work has since moved between reportage, portraiture and long-form photographic projects, including Unseen Waterloo, his battlefield portrait series exhibited at Somerset House.

Print Swap began with a gap Sam’s own wall and a long-held habit among photographers: tr...

Harriet Logan is a multi-award winning photographer who spent the first half of her career working on international assignments in places such as Sudan, Angola, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Somalia for a range of international newspapers and magazines.

She subsequently turned her attention to working commercially on advertising campaigns for various big brand clients, including The Pictet Group and Canon, alongside some of the worlds largest advertising agencies.

Today she curates the Incite Project, an issue driven collection of photographs broadly based around the subject of world events and conflict.

Harriet is...

Henri Kisielewski is a self-taught photographer whose work is concerned with the porous boundary between fact and fiction in documentary media.

His practice has been recognised and supported by several grants and awards, and he has exhibited in group shows and festivals internationally. In 2025, he was shortlisted for both the Prix Élysée and Grand Prix Images Vevey.

In 2021, Henri was employed by Magnum Photos to conduct the first complete review of their historic archive - he remains the only person to have seen the nearly 1 million images within. Informed by this experience, and his st...

Richard Young is a photographer who was once known as the “king of the paparazzi”.

His portfolio is a who’s who of some of the biggest stars in film, music, stage and popular culture from the past fifty years. From gatecrashing Elizabeth Taylor’s party for Richard Burton’s 50th at the Dorchester to later being invited to photograph her Damehood celebrations. He can count the first photographs of Paul Getty Jr. after his kidnapping as just one of his many scoops.

He was born in Hackney to a Jewish family and his father ran a hosi...

Ilvy Njiokiktjien is a Dutch photojournalist, filmmaker, podcast host and educator who has been creating and sharing stories for almost two decades. She is based in Utrecht, the Netherlands and is a contributing photographer to VII Foundation. Ilvy is committed to documenting the social and political issues that shape our world. Her work is characterized by a sensitive eye and a compassionate and personal relationship with her subjects. 

For nearly 2 decades, she chronicled South Africa’s first post-apartheid generation. Ilvy became intrigued by these young adults and portrayed them in her own, personal and intimate style. “Equality is the...

Jon McCormack is - as plainly stated on his Linked-In profile - a Photographer, Nerd, Educator and Conservationist

His photographic work is deeply informed by his upbringing in the stark, untamed landscapes of the Australian Outback, where early life among sheep and cattle fostered a profound respect for nature’s rhythms of resilience and fragility. Beginning as a teenager photographing quiet, often-overlooked moments in the bush, he developed a photographic voice rooted in patience, attention, and ecological empathy. Today, his images explore the intricate patterns and emotional textures of wild places, seeking to inspire both wonder and a...

Dragana Jurišić is a photographer, writer and filmmaker. She has exhibited extensively and won numerous awards.  Dragana’s work is in several significant collections, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Arts Council Collection, the Irish State Art Collection (OPW), the Bank of Spain, and others.

Her first book, YU: The Lost Country, received accolades worldwide. Her second book, Museum, a collaboration with Paula Meehan, was published in July 2019 and is now in its 2nd edition. Her Own, published in December 2022, received outstanding reviews in El País, The Irish Times and RTE Culture. Dragana is curren...

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Zackary Canepari is an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow whose work moves between documentary film and photography.  He began as a photojournalist in India and Pakistan before creating the Sundance-screened series California Is a place, a portrait of the golden state unraveling at the edges.

He later co-directed the feature documentary T-Rex (SXSW), following teenage Olympic boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields as she fought her way toward gold; the film was adapted by MGM into the narrative feature The Fire Inside. His Guggenheim-supported project Flint Is a place expanded documentary storytelling across film, photography, archival material, and imm...

Jessica Dimmock’s work focusses on humanistic and intimate storytelling. She is the recipient of numerous international awards for her photography and video work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three World Press Photo Awards for short films, The Inge Morath Award from Magnum, the F Award for Concerned Photography from Forma and Fabrica, The Infinity Award for Photojournalist of the Year from the International Center of Photography, and The Kodak Award for Best Cinematography at the Hamptons International Film Festival. She is a Sundance Edit and Story Lab Fellow, and her first feature film The Pearl was awarded the Grand Ju...

On episode 275, Philip discusses, among other things:

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Joachim Ladefoged is a Danish photographer born in 1970. He has worked as a professional since 1991, and is a member of the international photo agency VII. Today he is a staff photographer at the Danish Daily Jyllands-Posten, but over the years he has worked regularly for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, Mare, The New Yorker and TIME.

Joachim has received numerous awards for his work from institutions such as Visa D'Or, World Press Photo, POYi, Eissie, and Agfa, as well as Picture of the Year in Denmark. Over the years he has published 3 monographs, Albanians...

Lee Shulman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most significant archives of vernacular color photography in existence. Since 2017, the project has amassed nearly one million Kodachrome slides from the 1940s to the early 2000s — intimate, everyday images that might have otherwise been lost to time. Through curation and transformation, Lee reanimates these personal photographs, weaving them into compelling narratives that explore memory, family, love, and cultural shifts across generations.

Lee’s career also extends into film direction, notably with his debut feature documentary, "I Am Martin Parr," released in 2025. This...

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Rachel Elizabeth Seed is a Brooklyn and Los Angeles-based nonfiction storyteller working in film, photography, and writing.

In 2025, she won the Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award for her debut feature film, A Photographic Memory, which is also a New York Times Critics Pick.

Rachel’s work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Films, the Jewish Film Institute, the California Film Institute, Jewish Story Partners, NYFA, Field of Vision, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, the Maine Media Workshops, the Roy W. Dean grant, the National Arts Club, IFP, and many others. 

Formerly a p...

Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952), the man who the Daily Telegraph declared to be, “arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer” is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.

His major projects have been rural communities (1975–1982), The Last Resort (1983–1985), The Cost of Living (1987–1989), Small World (1987–1994) and Common Sense (1995–1999). Since 1994, Martin has been a member of Magnum Photos, where he scraped in by one vote and where between 2013 and 2017 he served as President. His w...

The man who the Daily Telegraph declared to be, “arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer” had a suburban childhood in the provincial county of Surrey, England, where his budding interest in the medium of photography was encouraged by his grandfather George Parr, himself a keen amateur photographer.

Martin went on to study photography at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 70s and since that time has worked on many, many photographic projects, publishing over 100 books of his own work and editing another 30. He has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and hi...

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Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist, filmmaker, speaker and educator who has been making images and telling stories for 40 years. His restless creativity has continually placed him at the forefront of new approaches to visual storytelling. Dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times, a sensitive eye and an intimate and compassionate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his intense and unsparing work. As a member of VII Photo, Ed has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition. 

Ed’s innovative approach to photography and fil...

Paul Sng is a bi-racial British Chinese filmmaker based in Edinburgh, Scotland whose work focuses on people who challenge the status quo. He has directed six feature documentaries, including Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche (winner of BIFA 2021 Best Documentary, BIFA 2021 Raindance Discovery Award), Tish (Sheffield DocFest 2023 Opening Gala film) and Reality Is Not Enough (Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 Closing Gala film). Paul strives to make bold and creatively ambitious films that connect emotionally with audiences, working collaboratively with great teams to tell stories about outsiders and amplify rebellious voices. In 2022 he was named as a BAFTA Breakthrough Artist a...

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Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity was published by Twin Palms more than a decade ago in 2013, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it,” Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as “The Polaroid Kidd.” And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art wor...

Merlin Daleman (b.1977) is a British photographer who has spent most of his adult life living in the Netherlands. He attended South Devon College, Torquay, the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) in the UK, and graduated from The Royal College of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works as a freelance documentary photographer for leading Dutch publications, including NRC Handelsblad, Dagblad Trouw, Financieel Dagblad, and De Groene Amsterdammer. He is the recipient of awards including the Silver Camera awards for Documentary Photography in the Netherlands in 2008 and 2010 and had received grants from the EU Journalism...

Eli Reed was born in the US in 1946 and studied pictorial illustration at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, graduating in 1969. In 1982, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he studied political science, urban affairs, and the prospects for peace in Central America.

Eli began photographing as a freelancer in 1970. His work from El Salvador, Guatemala and other Central American countries attracted the attention of Magnum, he was the first African American photographer, and indeed the first person of colour, to join the agency, becoming a full me...

Magnum legend Chris Steele-Perkins was born in Burma in 1947 to a Burmese mother and an English father, who brought him back to England when he was 2 years old. He published his first photobook The Teds in 1979 and shortly after that joined Magnum photos after an invitation to apply from none other than Josef Koudelka. He subsequently travelled all over the world, covering many of the major global conflicts of the 80’s and 90’s in between working extensively in his home country, and producing a number of books of that work, along with those from Afghanistan and later from his wife...

Tony Dočekal (Amsterdam, 1992) is a photographer and visual artist. Her work explores identity, belonging, and the friction between autonomy and societal expectations. Working intuitively, she combines personal encounters with quiet observations. Her images balance intimacy and distance, often showing how personal stories and landscapes reflect larger systems.

Tony’s first book, The Color of Money and Trees, was published by VOID in 2024 and launched at Paris Photo. The work was also exhibited at Biennale Images Vevey alongside her debut short film, Pearls on Credit. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from ArtEZ University of the Art...

John Rankin Waddell, or just Rankin, as he is more commonly known, is a British photographer, publisher, and film director. Best known for work that is on the cultural cusp and leading future trends, he has produced rule-breaking campaigns for brands such as Rolls Royce, Unilever, L’Oréal, Lego, and Samsonite; created wide-reaching projects for charities including Women’s Aid and Macmillan; and shot music videos for the likes of Miley Cyrus, Rita Ora, and Kelis.

As a photographer, Rankin’s portfolio ranges from portraiture to documentary. He has shot The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Kate Moss, K...

Marjolein Martinot is a Dutch photographer, based in France. She was always been drawn to photography from an early age, and has continued using and exploring the medium throughout her life, while raising a family of six children. Her photography touches on the poetic, while striving to remain authentic and true at the same time. She aims to evoke sentiments by using and mixing different photographic approaches and analogue cameras. The prime focus of Marjolein’s work is on everyday life: family, friends, and the places and things that touch her. She currently works on personal projects and commissions. Her debu...

Anna Arendt is a photographer and visual artist living and working in Berlin whose images explore memory, silence, loss, and the invisible links between personal history and larger events. Her work often moves between personal, historical, and symbolic worlds, shot in black-and-white to capture places where the past and present meet.

Anna was born in the German Democratic Republic and was 24 when The Wall fell, at which time her daughter was two. Her parents were born 1940 in Germany, children of war. Both of her grandfathers had been soldiers, who had been in Poland between 1940 and 1942. One came...

Mohamed Bourouissa is an Algerian-born French artist (b. 1978) who lives and works in Paris. Mohamed's practice moves between photography, video, sculpture, and installation, often blurring the lines between these mediums. His work explores social issues, power dynamics, and the representation of marginalized communities.

He often engages with or embeds himself into specific communities for extended periods, spending significant time with individuals and groups to understand their experiences and perspectives before then creating collaborative works that challenge societal structures and explore the complexities of identity. 

Mohamed's work frequently addresses the tensions between different social contexts, particularly t...

Paul Seawright is Professor of Photography and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. His photographic work is held in many museum collections including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Tate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, International Centre of Photography New York, Arts Councils of Ireland, England and N.Ireland, UK Government Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. In 2002 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum London to undertake a war art commission in Afghanistan and his photographs of battle-sites and minefields have subsequently been exhibited in North America, Canada, Ireland, Spain, France...