A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers
A Small Voice is a fortnightly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with a diverse range of talented photographers, from established award-winning stars to emerging talents. Host Ben Smith, himself a photographer, discusses their lives, work, and creative processes. The free feed includes the most recent 50 episodes, with a full archive of over 200 episodes available to members.
Episodes
293 - Christina Assi
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
292 - Reuben wu
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 bran
291 - Iva Sidash
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, r
290 - Richard Sharum
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
289 - Clémentine Schneidermann
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 photogra
288 - Aria Shahrokhshahi
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
287 - Lorenzo Meloni
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 cu
286 - Ximena Borrazás
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, T
285 - Sam Faulkner
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 reportag
284 - Harriet Logan
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 Pic
283 - Henri Kisielewski
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
282 - Richard Young
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 P
281 - Ilvy Njiokiktjien
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
280 - Jon McCormack
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, oft
279 - Dragana Jurišić
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,
278 - Nederlands Foto Museum Special
Featuring:
Sjef van Duin, Librarian
Roderick van der Loos, Interim Director
Zippora Elders, incoming General & Artistic Director
Grace Wong-Si-Kwie, Head of Presentations and Public Outreach
Guinevere Ras, Curator of opening exhibition Awakening in Blue
Martijn van den Broek, Head of Collections
Joop De Jong, Guest Curator of opening exhibition, Rotterdam In Focus
Website | Instagram
Be
277 - Zackary Canepari
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
276 - Jessica Dimmock
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 t
275 - Philip Blenkinsop
On episode 275, Philip discusses, among other things:His ‘cabinet of curiosities’ studio spaceA recent, powerful urge to photograph in AustraliaWhy he left the newspaper world there in favour of ThailandHis early project “The Cars That Ate Bangkok”His sense of anger at injusticeHis ‘near death experience’ on Sleeping Dog MountainProcess, shooting on film, and working close to the subjectThe influe
274 - Joachim Ladefoged
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
273 - Lee Shulman
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 thes
272 - Year In Review 2025
Featuring:Ed SykesIan HowarthDina LitovskyJoseph Michael LopezMike AbrahamsIan MacdonaldKatrin KoenningTomasz TomaszewskiMackenzie CalleMarc WilsonPaul SeawrightMohamed BourouissaAnna ArendtMarjolein MartinotRankinTony DocekalEli ReedMerlin DalemanMike BrodiePaul SngEd KashiRachel Elizabeth Seed
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271 - Rachel Elizabeth Seed
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 Fi
270 - Paris Photo 2025 Special
Featuring:Yasuhiro OgawaMarshall ToLua RibeiraGianluca Gamberini (L'artiere books)Eleonora AgostiniPia-Paulina GuilmothAletheia CaseyBooks/Projects mentioned:Lost in Kyoto, Yasuhiro OgawaBlank Notes, Marshall To44 Irvine Street 1970-1971, Susan MeiselasAgony In The Garden, Lua RibeiraCalling The Bird Home, Cheryl St. OngeAnother England, Phil ToledanoA Study On Waitressing, Eleonora AgostiniFlower
269 - Ed Kashi (#2)
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 subject
268 - Paul Sng
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
267 - BoP Festival 2025
Fearturing:Merlin DalemanDavid O’MaraJem SouthamMartin ParrChristoph Bangert from PhotobusAyesha JonesMark PowerTom Shaw
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266 - Mike Brodie
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 collect
265 - Merlin Daleman
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
264 - Eli Reed
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 Sal
263 - Tony Dočekal
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
262 - Rankin
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 sh
261 - Marjolein Martinot
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 photograp
260 - Anna Arendt
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 T
259 - Mohamed Bourouissa
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 extende
258 - Paul Seawright
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 Contempor
257 - Photo London 2025 Special
Featuring:Francis HodgesonMaria SukkarSophie ParkerAmi BouhassaneTom HunterSilvana Trevale (but not Gabriel Pinto).Zed Nelson Featured in the Positions exhibition:Adam Rouhana (@adam.rouhana), Aikaterini Gegisian (@aikaterini_gegisian), Babak Kazemi (@babakkazemi1), Bibi Manavi (@bibimanavi), Ippolita Paolucci (@ippolitapaolucci), Kalpesh Lathigra (@kalpeshlathigra), Karim El Hayawan (@karimelhaya
256 - Marc Wilson
London-born British photographer Marc Wilson’s images document the memories, histories and stories that are set in the landscapes that surround us. His long term documentary projects include The Last Stand (2010-2014), A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust (2015-2021) and The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue (2021-2023).Marc’s aim is to tell stories through his photography, focusin
255 - Mackenzie Calle
Mackenzie Calle is a freelance documentary photographer and National Geographic Explorer based in Brooklyn. In 2024, she was awarded first prize in the World Press Photo Open Format category award (North & Central America) for her project the Gay Space Agency, and was a finalist for the Sony World Photography Awards.She was selected as a Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellow in 2022. That sam
254 - Tomasz Tomaszewski
Tomasz Tomaszewski has a Ph.D from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and is a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers, the Visum Archiv Agency of Hamburg, Germany, the National Geographic Creative Agency of Washington D.C., and the American Society of Media Photographers.He specializes in journalistic photography and has had his photos published in major newspapers and magazines worldwid
253 - Katrin Koenning
Katrin Koenning is a visual artist from Germany whose work travels across still and moving images and text, at times including found materials, painting and collage. Pursuing intimacy and interconnection her work centres around practice as relational encounter. Most stories evolve through years and use returning as a way of drawing closer. Different series often intersect, merging in and out of ea
252 - Ian Macdonald
Ian Macdonald (b. 1946) is an internationally acclaimed photographer born and raised in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, UK. He studied Graphic Design and Printmaking at Teesside College of Art in 1968 and went on to study Painting and Photography at Sheffield School of Art, Photography and Graphic Design at Birmingham Polytechnic and Education at Lancaster University. He pursued photography alongside dr
251 - Mike Abrahams
British photographer Mike Abrahams has worked as a freelance photographer for over 40 years having become renowned for his sensitive eye in documenting the lives of ordinary people often in extraordinary situations.In 1981 he was a cofounder of Network Photographers the Internationally renowned picture agency and his work has taken him around the world. His photographs have been published in all t
250 - Joseph Michael Lopez
Joseph Michael Lopez - JML, (b. 1973) is an independent photographer born in New York City to a Puerto Rican father and a mother who escaped the Cuban Revolution in 1967. He earned his MFA in 2011 at Columbia University. Lopez began his career as an analog cinematographer on the critically acclaimed Bruce Weber film, Chop Suey (2001). Currently, Joseph divides his time between long-form projects,
249 - Dina Litovsky
Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer living in New York City since 1991. Dina's imagery can be described as visual sociology. Her work explores the idea of leisure, often focusing on subcultures and social gatherings.Dina is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, New Yorker, GQ and New York Magazine. In 2020 Dina won the Nannen Prize, Germany's f
248 - Ian Howorth
Ian Howorth is a documentary photographer based in Brighton, UK. His work deals with themes of identity and culture. Through Setanta Books, Ian sold out his first book, Arcadia, in 2019 and published his second, A Country Kind of Silence, in 2023. Ian’s work has been featured in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, It’s Nice That and Huck.In episode 248, Ian discusses, among ot
247 - Ed Sykes
Ed Sykes is a photographer and visual artist based in London.Ed’s practice focuses on landscape and changes to the environment as a result of natural processes and human activity. This approach is in conjunction with a re-working of photographic materials and a disruption of traditional photographic production. The processes and effects of climate change are often replicated during the image makin
246 - The Year In Review 2024
Featuring:Richard KalvarNatalie KeyssarLorenzo CastoreEdward BurtynskyMitch EpsteinNicole TungLinda TroellerValerie BelinMichael AckermanJulia KochetovaChloé JaféDebi CornwallLouis QuailAbdul KircherDiana MatarKiana HayeriRobbie LawrenceAgnieszka SosnowskaPolly BradenStephan Vanfleteren
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245 - Paris Photo Fair 2024 Special
Featuring:Bieke DepoorterJesse LenzLucas FogliaSergio PurtellRichard SharumMark McLennanAlex WebbRebecca-Norris WebbMichal IwanowskiDragana JurisicLisa BarlowToma GerzhaGregory HalpernMark SteinmetzMaxime Riché Website | Instagram
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244 - Stephan Vanfleteren
Stephan Vanfleteren's career began as a staff photographer for the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. He continued to contribute to its weekend magazine as a freelancer until 2009.His radical black and white social documentary work covers the disappearing phenomena of everyday life in his homeland, Belgium. Over the years, Stephan has worked in conflict zones such as Kosovo, Rwanda and Afghanistan and h
243 - Unseen Festival 2024 Special
Featuring:Javier Hirschfeld MorenoFrancesco ZizolaMelissa SchriekChilli PowerSelf Publishers UnitedBryan SchutmaatTiffany JonesAtong AtemWebsite | Instagram
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242 - Polly Braden
Polly Braden is a documentary photographer whose work features an ongoing conversation between the people she photographs and the environment in which they find themselves. Highlighting the small, often unconscious gestures of her subjects, Polly particularly enjoys long-term, in depth collaborations that in turn lends her photographs a unique, quiet intimacy. She works on long-term, self-initiate
100 - Ben Smith
As a teenager I wanted to be a professional journalist and an amateur photographer. This was a perfectly good and eminently attainable goal for a bright, lower-middle class fifteen year old boy to have. So, for reasons that are too complicated to explore here, I promptly set about dismantling any prospect of achieving it in a miasma of Marlboro reds and vast quantities of Pakistani Black. After hu
000 - Ben Smith (intro)
Photographer, Ben Smith introduces a new weekly photography podcast: 'A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers' and answers a few 'frequently anticipated questions.'
Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £4 per month.Need a website? Or someone you know does? EXCLUSIVE LISTENER OFF
