PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf – Photography Podcast
- Episodes
- 129
- Released
- every two weeks
- Latest episode
- Nov 13, 2026
About the podcast
PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf is a photography podcast produced by the PhotoWork Foundation, featuring in-depth interviews with photographers, curators, and publishers. Episodes explore photobooks, artistic practice, long-term projects, and fine art photography today.
Episodes 129
Cole Barash on Photography, Family History, and When the Wind Blows North
Photographer Cole Barash joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his photobook When the Wind Blows North (TBW Books & Deadbeat Club). What began as a retracing of his father’s wilderness journeys grew into …
Show notes
Photographer Cole Barash joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his photobook When the Wind Blows North (TBW Books & Deadbeat Club). What began as a retracing of his father’s wilderness journeys grew into an exploration of how photography and family history shape each other over time. Barash and Wolf also look back at his early career as a snowboarding photographer. He speaks candidly about how his work has evolved since then, and why he lets every stage of his career remain visible.
https://www.instagram.com/cole_barash/
https://casemoregallery.com/artists/64-cole-barash/overview/
Cole Barash (b. USA) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans analog, digital and archival photography, sculpture, and film. His portraiture and still-life works are distinguished by an organic, spontaneous intimacy, capturing moments of quiet, yet profound, connection. Barash's artistic inquiry revolves around the interplay of color and composition between objects or temporal occurrences, often culminating in the creation of books or immersive installations. Drawing from a childhood immersed in natural landscapes, his work remains deeply influenced by nature—not only as a physical presence but as a dynamic force that shapes both form and perception. Barash’s work has been exhibited globally, and his books are held in prominent public collections, including the Franklin Furnace Archive and the MoMA Manhattan Artists’ Books Collection. His photography has garnered widespread recognition, appearing in esteemed publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others.
Photographers Peter van Agtmael and Paul Shambroom on the intersections of fine art photography and photojournalism.
Photographers Peter van Agtmael and Paul Shambroom join Sasha Wolf on PhotoWork to discuss their documentary practices: where they align, and where they part ways, with Shambroom working closer to the fine art …
Show notes
Photographers Peter van Agtmael and Paul Shambroom join Sasha Wolf on PhotoWork to discuss their documentary practices: where they align, and where they part ways, with Shambroom working closer to the fine art tradition and van Agtmael closer to photojournalism. The conversation ranges widely as they compare notes on the nature of documentary and its claims to truth, the ethical limits of the work, and how each engages with the communities they photograph, including questions of consent.
Paul Shambroom uses found and original photographs to explore American power and culture. His recent practice incorporates sourced images, collaborative theater and 3D constructions. His documentary subjects include nuclear weapons and small-town council meetings. He’s published three monographs: “Past Time”, “Meetings” and “Face to Face with the Bomb….” and a catalog for his mid-career touring exhibition “…Picturing Power.” He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Capital grantee, among other honors. His work has been in the Whitney Biennial and has been collected and exhibited by major museums including the San Francisco MoMA, MoMA (NY), the Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an Associate Professor Emeritus in Art, University of Minnesota.
https://www.instagram.com/paul_shambroom/
Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington, DC, in 1981. He was 20 years old and studying history at Yale on 9/11, an event that was pivotal in shaping his career. Shortly after graduating, he began documenting the United States at war and at home, which continues to be the anchor of his work.
Van Agtmael is known for his deeply affecting, sometimes surreal images, which explore themes of conflict, history, memory, nationalism, militarism, race, and class. He has spent more than 15 years covering US wars from both sides and countless angles, from embedding with military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to covering the civilian cost of the wars. He has also extensively documented the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Along with ongoing personal projects, Van Agtmael has photographed for many leading publications, including the New York Times Magazine, where his images have been featured on multiple front covers. His work is held at the International Center of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, and Yale University Art Gallery. He is the author of five books, 2nd Tour: Hope I Don’t Die (2009), Buzzing at the Sill: Peter van Agtmael (2016), 2020 (2020), Sorry for the War (2020), and Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home (2024).
Van Agtmael is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the LUMIX FREELENS Award, the Aaron Siskind Grant, and several World Press Photo Awards. Since 2014, he has been a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program in Beirut. Van Agtmael joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a full member in 2013.
Photographer Irina Rozovsky on Embracing Discomfort, Breaking Routine, and the Creative Process
Photographer Irina Rozovsky joins Sasha Wolf on PhotoWork to discuss the release of her latest photobook, Mountain Black Heart (MACK). The conversation explores how Rozovsky’s nomadic photographic journey …
Show notes
Photographer Irina Rozovsky joins Sasha Wolf on PhotoWork to discuss the release of her latest photobook, Mountain Black Heart (MACK). The conversation explores how Rozovsky’s nomadic photographic journey through the Balkan region shaped the book’s images and underlying atmosphere. Rozovsky and Wolf reflect on the parallels between making photographs and making a photobook, examining how distance from the routines of home, unfamiliar surroundings, and a willingness to embrace discomfort inform her creative process.
https://www.mackbooks.us/collections/new-books/products/mountain-black-heart-irina-rozovsky
Irina Rozovsky (born 1981, Moscow) is drawn to regions with complex histories. While her photographs are rooted in reality, they ultimately weave a personal, psychological portrait of place. She has published four monographs: Mountain Black Heart (MACK, 2026), In Plain Air (MACK, 2021), Island in my Mind (Verlag Kettler, 2015), and One to Nothing (Kehrer, 2011). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and more. Irina lives and works in Athens, Georgia where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography project space The Humid.
Artists Dru Donovan & Jon Rubin on the Life and Legacy of Larry Sultan - Part II
Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected …
Show notes
Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK), the first publication devoted to Sultan's wide-ranging use of writing as a personal, artistic, and pedagogical tool, illustrated throughout with previously unseen materials from his archive. Former students, assistants, and friends of Sultan, Donovan and Rubin share personal stories about his approach to photography, teaching, and mentorship, while reflecting on his lasting influence and the privilege of collaborating with his family on this book.
Dru Donovan
Dru Donovan works with both photography and video to examine the connection between physical and emotional occurrences by constructing or revisiting human experiences. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally and was included in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Williamson Knight Gallery and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Donovan’s photographs were published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine and Matte Magazine. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards Donovan has received are the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016.
Jon Rubin
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collaborative interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His socially engaged projects include running a barter-based nomadic art school, founding a national museum, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and co-directing another that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In 2019, with the support from Creative Capital, Rubin built an exact replica of his friend Sohrab Kashani’s Tehran apartment so they both could live and work together in a parallel universe that bypassed the Trump travel ban.
Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Carnegie International; The Lyon Biennale; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Rubin and collaborator Lenka Clayton, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange.
His work has been reported on internationally by outlets including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Art in America, Artforum, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Conflict Kitchen, Rubin’s collaborative seven-year work with artist Dawn Weleski, was named as one of the 100 Artworks that “Defined the Decade” by Artnet News.
Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
Larry Sultan
Larry Sultan (American photographer, b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. His work, heavily influenced by the post-war popular culture of Los Angeles, plays with notions of documentary and staged photography and reveals the psychological nuances found in the everyday suburban landscape and family life. Acclaimed for his use of color and light, Sultan is also known for uniquely collapsing the distance between himself and his subject. His series include Swimmers (1978-82), Pictures from Home (1983-92), The Valley (2004) and Homeland (2006-2009). Sultan co-authored the ground-breaking work, Evidence (1977) with Mike Mandel. A beloved and highly influential educator, Sultan taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009.
Sultan’s work has been widely published, exhibited, and collected worldwide including Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, London; Stedejik Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Sultan was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, US Department of International Arts and Lectures Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. Sultan’s project Pictures from Home was developed for the stage and premiered on Broadway in 2023.
Artists Dru Donovan & Jon Rubin on the Life and Legacy of Larry Sultan
Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected …
Show notes
Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK), the first publication devoted to Sultan's wide-ranging use of writing as a personal, artistic, and pedagogical tool, illustrated throughout with previously unseen materials from his archive. Former students, assistants, and friends of Sultan, Donovan and Rubin share personal stories about his approach to photography, teaching, and mentorship, while reflecting on his lasting influence and the privilege of collaborating with his family on this book.
Dru Donovan
Dru Donovan works with both photography and video to examine the connection between physical and emotional occurrences by constructing or revisiting human experiences. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally and was included in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Williamson Knight Gallery and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Donovan’s photographs were published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine and Matte Magazine. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards Donovan has received are the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016.
Jon Rubin
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collaborative interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His socially engaged projects include running a barter-based nomadic art school, founding a national museum, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and co-directing another that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In 2019, with the support from Creative Capital, Rubin built an exact replica of his friend Sohrab Kashani’s Tehran apartment so they both could live and work together in a parallel universe that bypassed the Trump travel ban.
Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Carnegie International; The Lyon Biennale; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Rubin and collaborator Lenka Clayton, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange.
His work has been reported on internationally by outlets including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Art in America, Artforum, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Conflict Kitchen, Rubin’s collaborative seven-year work with artist Dawn Weleski, was named as one of the 100 Artworks that “Defined the Decade” by Artnet News.
Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
Larry Sultan
Larry Sultan (American photographer, b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. His work, heavily influenced by the post-war popular culture of Los Angeles, plays with notions of documentary and staged photography and reveals the psychological nuances found in the everyday suburban landscape and family life. Acclaimed for his use of color and light, Sultan is also known for uniquely collapsing the distance between himself and his subject. His series include Swimmers (1978-82), Pictures from Home (1983-92), The Valley (2004) and Homeland (2006-2009). Sultan co-authored the ground-breaking work, Evidence (1977) with Mike Mandel. A beloved and highly influential educator, Sultan taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009.
Sultan’s work has been widely published, exhibited, and collected worldwide including Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, London; Stedejik Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Sultan was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, US Department of International Arts and Lectures Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. Sultan’s project Pictures from Home was developed for the stage and premiered on Broadway in 2023.
Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan on Curation and Community Engagement
Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan (CPW) join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss the inaugural Upstate Photography Biennial and the curatorial process behind this major contemporary photography exhibition …
Show notes
Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan (CPW) join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss the inaugural Upstate Photography Biennial and the curatorial process behind this major contemporary photography exhibition. Chao, Ryan, and Wolf explore how CPW develops exhibitions with both the local community and broader audience in mind, building meaningful public engagement, and what artists can do to establish and sustain relationships with photography and arts organizations.
Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.
Adam Ryan is a photography specialist and curator based in Poughkeepsie, New York. He gained experience working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he focused on the museum’s permanent collection of photographs, while also managing its Collection Study Center. He collaborated on multiple exhibitions such as Japanese Photography from Post War to Now, Selections from the Sack Photographic Trust, and Nothing Stable Under Heaven. Before that, he worked in the Photography Department of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his primary focus was a major retrospective on the work of renowned artist Duane Michals – Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals. As a student, he learned photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continued into graduate school at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.
Jarod Lew & Reagan Louie on Asian-American Identity and Its Shifting Photographic Language.
Photographers Jarod Lew and Reagan Louie join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss how they explore cultural identity, personal loss, and trauma through photography. Lew and Louie are Asian American …
Show notes
Photographers Jarod Lew and Reagan Louie join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss how they explore cultural identity, personal loss, and trauma through photography. Lew and Louie are Asian American photographers from different generations, and their work reflects how the exploration of cultural identity in contemporary photography has evolved over the decades. While Louie takes a documentary photography approach, Lew works through more conceptual constructs. Their conversation with Wolf highlights the visual differences between their practices while revealing striking resonances in how they discuss their approach.
Jarod Lew is an artist who draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. Through this exploration, his work contends with the performativity of race and its instability as a locus of meaning.
His project, Please Take Off Your Shoes was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021, and was exhibited in a group exhibition at SFMOMA titled Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023. His other project, In Between You and Your Shadow, examines his relationship with his mother, who was the fiancé of Vincent Chin--the subject of a hate-crime that brought national attention to matters of Asian American civil rights. In 2025, Lew will mount his first museum exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art titled- Strange You Never Knew.
His works are held in public and private collections including the Cantor Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, San Francisco, Harvard Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine.
Lew graduated with an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.
Reagan Louie’s photography and installations explore global transformation and cultural identity. He is currently at work on several projects that focus on the relationship between home and homeland; including a book about his family’s immigration from China to America. And a Virtual Reality experience about his ancestral home, Wing Wor.
His work is exhibited at institutions: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Philadelphia Art Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Gwangju Biennale. Louie’s photographs are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Cantor Art Museum.
Louie’s photographs are widely published. His books have received critical acclaim. The New York Times Book Review named his first book on China, “Toward a Truer Life”, the photography book of the year.
He is the recipient of numerous awards - The Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Lange-Taylor Prize, and Fulbright Fellowship.
Cheryle St. Onge & Scott Offen on Intimate Collaboration and Photographing the Personal.
Photographers Cheryle St. Onge and Scott Offen join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss their photobooks, Calling the Birds Home and Grace, both published by L'Artiere Editions. In this conversation, St. Onge …
Show notes
Photographers Cheryle St. Onge and Scott Offen join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss their photobooks, Calling the Birds Home and Grace, both published by L'Artiere Editions. In this conversation, St. Onge and Offen generously share their deeply personal approaches to collaborating with and photographing people with whom they have profound emotional connections. St. Onge reflects on documenting her mother's experience with dementia, describing the work as an act of communication, care, and connection. Offen discusses his collaborative portrait project with his partner, Grace, exploring themes of co-authorship, gender, representation, and aging.
https://www.cherylestonge.com/
Scott Offen (b. 1960) is an American East Coast photographer whose work has been exhibited across the United States and prominently featured online. Scott holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He was selected as a finalist for the Critical Mass top 200 Photolucida award in 2021 and has been chosen as a participant in the Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review in 2020 and 2021. Scott became a recipient of the MassArt Graduate Thesis Award in 2024.
Cheryle St. Onge was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She grew up on college campuses as the only child of a Physics professor and a painter. She received an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts.
St. Onge's work focus on the crossover of art and science and photography's ability to distill our sense of time and curiosity. She makes pictures predominantly with an 8 x 10 view camera and considers her work a collaborative process.
Her photographs have been widely exhibited, most notably at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Princeton University, Griffin Museum, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts College of Art, Rick Wester Fine Arts, and with the American Institute of Architects traveling exhibition. She has received numerous awards and residences, among them a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Critical Mass Finalist Exhibition Award, Polaroid Materials Artist Support Grant, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Graduate Fellowship, and was named one of the ‘Top 50 Photographers’ in the country by Time Magazine.
Historian and Curator Audrey Sands on Lisette Model, Photo History, and the Archive.
Photography Historian and Curator Audrey Sands joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss her book, Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation). Drawing on years of research, Sands presents …
Show notes
Photography Historian and Curator Audrey Sands joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss her book, Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation). Drawing on years of research, Sands presents Lisette Model's rarely seen archive of photographs of 1950s jazz legends, including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Percy Heath, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Sands and Wolf discuss the rise of fine art photography as a collectible medium in the latter half of the 20th century, the role of museums and institutions in shaping the narrative of photographic history, and the role of the historian in editing and interpreting an artist's work posthumously.
https://www.instagram.com/audreyleesands/
Audrey Sands is a historian of photography and curator who specializes in twentieth-century American photography.. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in the History of Art from Yale University, an M.St. in the History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in Art History from Barnard College.
Since February 2025, Sands has served as the Richard L. Menschel Associate Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, where she oversees a collection of approximately 75,000 photographs and time-based media ranging from the early 19th century to the present. Her appointment followed a postdoctoral fellowship as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2022–25), during which she contributed to the exhibitions Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection (2024–25) and the multi-venue Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 (2025–26).
Prior to the NGA, from 2019 to 2022, Sands held the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography position at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), University of Arizona—a joint appointment with Phoenix Art Museum—where her exhibitions included Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi's America, 1940–1978 (2021–22) and Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961–1989 (2022). Earlier curatorial positions include the Department of Photographs at The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Sands has been the lead scholar on the work of photographer Lisette Model for over a decade, beginning with her Yale dissertation, “Lisette Model and the Inward Turn of Photographic Modernism.” Her most recent publication, Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation, 2025), realized a suppressed collaboration between Model and Langston Hughes that had been shelved during the McCarthy era, publishing for the first time nearly 200 of Model's approximately 1,500 jazz negatives alongside Hughes's original essay and new scholarship by Sands.
Her ongoing research on flash photography—supported by a 2021 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—is developing toward a publication and exhibition titled The Shape of Light: History, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Flash Photography.
Eli Durst on Reframing Documentary, Learning as Process, and Community Engagement.
Photographer and educator Eli Durst joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his photobooks, artistic practice, and the evolving definition of documentary photography. Durst reflects on what it means to push …
Show notes
Photographer and educator Eli Durst joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his photobooks, artistic practice, and the evolving definition of documentary photography. Durst reflects on what it means to push and rethink documentary work today, from image-making to long-term engagement with subjects and place.
Drawing on his experience working with Joel Meyerowitz, Durst also shares how he learned to build a sustainable life as an artist, balancing creative work with family. He discusses the role of mentorship, ongoing learning, and how collaboration with publishers and editors can reshape a project through new perspectives on sequencing and editing.
The conversation also explores the importance of community in documentary practice, and how embedding within a community is often central to the work, sometimes even more than the act of photographing itself.
https://www.instagram.com/durzt
Eli Durst is an American artist whose work explores the social forces and group dynamics that shape the suburban American experience. Durst’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have been featured in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Atlantic among others. He has published three monographs: The Community (Mörel, 2020), The Four Pillars (Loose Joints, 2022), and The Children’s Melody (Gnomic 2025).
Durst lives and works in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts. Durst has received numerous prizes, including the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize and a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mitch Epstein on Environmental Photography, Activism, and His Career - Episode 109
Photographer, director, and producer Mitch Epstein joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his storied career in photography, environmental activism, and artistic influences. From early inspiration by Garry …
Show notes
Photographer, director, and producer Mitch Epstein joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his storied career in photography, environmental activism, and artistic influences. From early inspiration by Garry Winogrand to guidance from John Szarkowski, Epstein reflects on how he evolved into a research-driven, project-based photographer focused on environmental issues.
He also discusses his work in film as a production designer and co-producer on Mississippi Masala (1991) and Salaam Bombay! (1988), and shares insights on privilege, longevity, and sustaining a life in photography.
Mitch Epstein has photographed the landscape and culture of America for half a century. A graduate of Cooper Union, he became a pioneer of 1970s fine-art color photography. Epstein has been inducted into the National Academy of Design (2020) and was awarded the Prix Pictet (2011), Berlin Prize (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002). His work has been shown and collected by museums worldwide, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery in Washington DC, The Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Los Angeles’s Getty Museum and LACMA, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Recent exhibitions include “American Nature” (photographs and multi-media installations) at the Gallerie d’Italia museum in Torino, Italy (2024-25); “In India,” (photographs and films) at Les Rencontres d'Arles in the Abbey of Montmajour, Arles, France (2022); and “Property Rights” at The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas (2020-21). Epstein's seventeen books, mostly published by Steidl Verlag, include Recreation (2022, 2005), Property Rights (2021), New York Arbor (2013), American Power (2009), and Family Business (2004), winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
Epstein’s mixed media work includes films, moving image with sound installations, and performance. In 2013, The Walker Art Center commissioned and premiered a theatrical rendition of his American Power series. Directed by Annie B. Parsons and Paul Lazar, the performance combined original live music by Erik Friedlander and live storytelling by Epstein; and included video, projected photographs, and archival material. In documentary film, Epstein was director of Dad and Retail (2003) and director of photography for India Cabaret (1988). He was production designer and co-producer for the feature films Mississippi Masala (1991) and Salaam Bombay! (1988).
Epstein’s most recent exhibition, American Nature, assembles three self-contained yet integrated photographic series (Old Growth, Property Rights, American Power); a multi-channel video-sound installation with tonal music by Mike Tamburo and Samer Ghadry filmed performing in the forest (Forest Waves), and a looped projection with music by David Lang, performed by Maya Beiser (Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut). Together these five pieces investigate notions of wilderness and human society; and their both collaborative and troubled co-existence.
Epstein lives in New York City and Massachusetts.
Jess T. Dugan & Charlotte Cotton on Collaboration, Community, and the Evolution of Love Pictures. - Episode 108
Photographer Jess T. Dugan and writer Charlotte Cotton join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss their 2 volume book, Love Pictures, published by Radius Books. Developed through their friendship and an ongoing …
Show notes
Photographer Jess T. Dugan and writer Charlotte Cotton join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss their 2 volume book, Love Pictures, published by Radius Books. Developed through their friendship and an ongoing dialogue between Dugan and Cotton, Love Pictures explores key themes shaping Dugan’s photographic practice, including gender and identity, family and politics, writing and language, the photobook as object, and the dynamics of exhibition spaces. These conversations expand outward to include voices from their broader creative communities, featuring contributors such as Dawoud Bey, Kelli Connell, and Dorothy Moss. In this episode, Jess, Charlotte, and Sasha discuss how this project evolved from an intimate exchange into a comprehensive survey of Dugan’s work.
Jess T. Dugan (b. 1986, they/them, lives in St. Louis) is an artist whose work explores identity and the complexities of the human condition. While their practice is centered around photography, it also includes writing, video, audio, drawing, and installation. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over seventy museums.
Charlotte Cotton (b. 1970, lives in London) is a curator and writer who explores photographic culture. She has held positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Photographers’ Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, and California Museum of Photography. Her book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, has been published in fourteen languages and has been a key text in charting the rise of photography as an undisputed art form in this century.
Ed Templeton on Influence, Process, and an Insider’s Approach to Photography - Episode 107
Photographer and artist Ed Templeton joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to reflect on his evolution from professional skateboarder to photographer and painter, and how early influences like Nan Goldin and Larry …
Show notes
Photographer and artist Ed Templeton joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to reflect on his evolution from professional skateboarder to photographer and painter, and how early influences like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark shaped his approach to documenting his own life. Templeton discusses his photobook Wires Crossed (Aperture), an intimate look at skate culture from an insider’s perspective, and his collaborative process with editor Lesley A. Martin. The conversation looks into Templeton's hybrid analog and digital workflow and concludes with the development of Contemporary Suburbium (Nazraeli Press), an accordion style book, made in collaboration with his wife, photographer Deanna Templeton, highlighting his ongoing engagement with the photobook and everyday subject matter.
Ed Templeton (b.1972) is an American painter and photographer whose work reflects human behavior with emphasis on youth subcultures, religious affectation, and suburban conventions using a cinéma vérité approach embracing chance encounters. Templeton is a respected cult figure in the subculture of skateboarding, a two-time world-champion, and Skateboarding Hall of Fame inductee. He is best known for his photographic books and multimedia exhibitions. His work has been exhibited in museums worldwide including MOCA, Los Angeles, ICP, NYC, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunsthalle, Vienna, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SMAK Museum Belgium, Orange County Museum of Art, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.
Curran Hatleberg on Revisiting Past Work, Staying Present, and the Ethics of his Practice - Episode 106
Photographer and educator Curran Hatleberg returns to PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his latest monograph, Blood Green (TBW Books). Hatleberg reflects on how the photobook emerged from images left out of …
Show notes
Photographer and educator Curran Hatleberg returns to PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his latest monograph, Blood Green (TBW Books).
Hatleberg reflects on how the photobook emerged from images left out of his earlier publication, River’s Dream, and how revisiting those omissions opened a new way of thinking about editing, continuity, and the evolving life of a body of work.
He speaks about the ethics at the center of his practice, an engagement with people grounded in mutual curiosity and respect, and the role of presence, both with and without the camera. Now balancing his life as an artist, partner, and father, Hatleberg considers how time reshapes practice. The episode concludes with a meditation on art making as a form of self-portraiture, a record of who we were at a given moment.
https://tbwbooks.com/products/blood-green?_pos=2&_psq=curran&_ss=e&_v=1.0
Curran Hatleberg is a photographer based in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum, MASS MoCA, the International Center of Photography and Higher Pictures. In 2019, Hatleberg was featured in the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works are held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art among others. Hatleberg is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Maryland State Arts Council Grant, a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant, and a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant. He has published five books, most recently Blood Green in 2025. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016, and his second monograph, River’s Dream, was published by TBW Books in 2022. Hatleberg has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Cooper Union and Yale University where he is currently a visiting critic in photography. He holds a BA in painting from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in photography from Yale University.
Ocean Vuong on Pursuing a Creative Life in Photography & Art - Episode 105
Ocean Vuong, poet, essayist, novelist, educator, and photographer, joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf for an in-depth conversation about his solo photography exhibition Sõng and the accompanying photobook …
Show notes
Ocean Vuong, poet, essayist, novelist, educator, and photographer, joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf for an in-depth conversation about his solo photography exhibition Sõng and the accompanying photobook, presented at CPW. In this episode, Vuong reflects on storytelling across mediums, creative practice, and the discipline behind writing and photography. Drawing from his life experience, he speaks candidly about process, vulnerability, and the courage required to share work publicly. This episode offers grounded insight for artists who question their creative voice or the value of presenting their work.
https://cpw.org/exhibition/song/
Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 41 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award.
Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.
He currently splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.
Alejandro Cartagena - Episode 104
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Alejandro Cartagena returns to discuss his mid-career solo exhibition Ground Rules at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, along with the accompanying book published …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Alejandro Cartagena returns to discuss his mid-career solo exhibition Ground Rules at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, along with the accompanying book published by Aperture. Alejandro and Sasha dig into how both the exhibition and the book came together, from concept to execution. He also reflects on the lasting impact of his seminal project Carpoolers, and how it shaped his thinking around photography, technology, and intent. The conversation expands to the broader cultural stakes of the medium, including Alejandro’s recent investigations into AI-generated imagery.
https://alejandrocartagena.com
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/alejandro-cartagena-ground-rules/
https://aperture.org/books/alejandro-cartagena-ground-rules/
Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others.
Alejandro is a self publisher and co-editor and has created several award wining titles including Insurrection Nation, Studio Cartagena 2021, Santa Barbara Save US, Skinnerboox, 2020, A Small Guide to Homeownership, The Velvet Cell 2020, We Love Our Employees, Gato Negro 2019, Santa Barbara Shame on US, Skinnerboox, 2017, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption, The velvet Cell, 2017, Rivers of Power, Newwer, 2016, Santa Barbara return Jobs to US, Skinnerboox, 2016, Headshots, Self-published, 2015, Before the War, Self-published, 2015, Carpoolers, Self-published with support of FONCA Grant, 2014, Suburbia Mexicana, Daylight/ Photolucida 2010. Some of his books are in the Yale University Library, the Tate Britain, and the 10×10 Photobooks/MFH Houston book collections among others.
Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo Leon in Mexico among others. He has been named an International Discoveries of the FotoFest festival, a FOAM magazine TALENT and an Emerging photographer of PDN magazine. He has also been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award and has been nominated for the Santa Fe Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet Prize, the Photoespaña Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award. His work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper, among others.
Nelson Chan - Episode 103
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by photographer, publisher, editor, and educator Nelson Chan. Together, they trace the winding path that led Nelson to his dream job as a professor …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by photographer, publisher, editor, and educator Nelson Chan. Together, they trace the winding path that led Nelson to his dream job as a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Along the way, Nelson reflects on the “guardian angels” who helped him stay the course, the openness that allowed unexpected opportunities to shape his trajectory, and the community of friends and collaborators who eventually inspired the founding of TIS Books. Sasha and Nelson also talk about the value of building connections, putting yourself out there, and treating your career as a marathon rather than a sprint.
https://www.nelsonchanphotography.com/
Nelson Chan was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from Hong Kong and Taiwan and has spent most of his life between the States and Hong Kong. Having grown up between two continents, this immigrant experience influences the majority of his work.
Nelson received his BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Hartford Art School, respectively. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; and 798 Space, Beijing, China. His books are collected in the institutional libraries of The MET, The Guggenheim, SEMOMA, The Whitney Museum, The Harry Ransom Center, and MoMA, among others.
Along with his own photographic work, book publishing and education are extensions of, what Nelson refers to as, an industrious studio practice. He is co-founder of TIS books, an independent art book publisher and was production manager at the Aperture Foundation from 2016-19. In 2025, Nelson was awarded tenure at California College of the Arts but ultimately left the Bay Area to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design as an associate professor of photography.
Tyler Mitchell - Episode 102
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell joins Sasha to discuss his Aperture book, Wish This Was Real. Tyler speaks candidly about learning by doing, the …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell joins Sasha to discuss his Aperture book, Wish This Was Real. Tyler speaks candidly about learning by doing, the value of taking risks, and the creative rewards that follow. He and Sasha also explore the central role of collaboration in his practice, particularly how that ethos shapes his approach to building tableaux.
https://www.tylermitchell.co/books/wish-this-was-real-book
Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, Atlanta, GA) is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. He received a BFA in Film and Television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchell’s work reimagines narratives of Black beauty and desire, embracing history while envisioning fictionalized moments of an aspirational future. His photographs and films present Black life through themes of play, empowerment, and self-determination.
Mitchell’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Brooklyn Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, among others.
He has presented exhibitions internationally, including The New Black Vanguard (Aperture Gallery, New York); I Can Make You Feel Good (FOAM, Amsterdam; ICP, New York); Chrysalis (Gagosian, London); Domestic Imaginaries (SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah); and Idyllic Space (High Museum of Art, Atlanta). His European touring exhibition, Wish This Was Real (C/O Berlin, 2024), brought together a decade of work exploring Black beauty, leisure, and imagination, traveling to Helsinki, Lausanne, and concluding at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2025–26). Mitchell’s photography has appeared in Aperture, Dazed, i-D, Vogue, Vanity Fair, WSJ, and Zeit Magazin, alongside collaborations with Gucci, Loewe, Ferragamo, and JW Anderson.
April Watson - Episode 101
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, April Watson, Senior Curator of Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, joins Sasha to discuss her upcoming exhibition, American …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, April Watson, Senior Curator of Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, joins Sasha to discuss her upcoming exhibition, American Prospects and Landscape Photography, 1839 to Today. The two dive into an insider’s conversation about how acquisitions—whether through donations or direct purchases—shape curatorial decisions. April speaks about the importance of honoring donor gifts through thoughtful exhibitions, and about working closely with museum education staff to shape exhibition language to engage audiences who may not have an art-historical background. She then turns the tables, inviting Sasha to share her perspective on the current state of the photographic art market and how it has evolved or devolved over time.
https://www.instagram.com/nama_photographs/
April M. Watson is Senior Curator of Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. During her eighteen-year tenure at the museum, Watson has curated over 20 exhibitions that span the history of photography. These include: American Prospects and Landscape Photography, 1839 to the Present (forthcoming 2026); Strange and Familiar Places (2025); Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City (2023, with the High Museum of Art); Jim Dow: Signs (2022); Gordon Parks X Muhammad Ali: The Image of a Champion, 1966/1970 (2020, with the Gordon Parks Foundation); Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time (2018, with the George Eastman Museum); Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet (2013); and Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans (2012). Prior to the Nelson-Atkins, Watson held curatorial research positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Kansas. She is currently at work on a major exhibition for 2027 that explores the relationship between early photography the antislavery movement. The exhibition will also feature major contemporary works inspired by this history.
Episode 100
In this 100th episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and Michael celebrate with some of their favorite clips from the past 5 years. They also play some wonderful tributes from listeners and guests who …
Show notes
In this 100th episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and Michael celebrate with some of their favorite clips from the past 5 years. They also play some wonderful tributes from listeners and guests who submitted recordings to help celebrate this milestone for the show. Listed below are the inspiring clips from Sasha’s conversations with our amazing guests. Thank you to our listeners who wrote or sent in recordings and to all our listeners who have supported the show, and thank you to our guests who were so generous with their time and their stories.
Community:
11:20 Curran Hatleberg
16:27 Gillian Laub
19:06 Carolyn Drake
Origins:
23:20 Keisha Scarville
31:37 Rahim Fortune
38:01 Shirin Neshat
Editing:
45:36 Gregory Halpern
52:05 Todd Hido
56:02 Ron Jude
https://photowork.foundation
The PhotoWork Foundation supports the development and education of post-documentary photographic artists and cultivates an audience for their work. Through a diverse program of outreach to individual artists and those who will be enriched by the results of their sustained efforts, the Foundation seeks to empower an aspect of photography that is often not commercially viable but is essential to the collective understanding of what it looks like to be living in society today. The PhotoWork Foundation believes that providing education, guidance, mentorship, and resources to early and mid-career photographers builds a connected community of artists that will collectively make important contributions to a common humanist perspective on our shared culture.
Mike Brodie - Episode 99
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer Mike Brodie talks about his raw, intimate and powerful new book, Failing (Twin Palms). Growing up with a tough home life, Brodie found escape in the …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer Mike Brodie talks about his raw, intimate and powerful new book, Failing (Twin Palms). Growing up with a tough home life, Brodie found escape in the punk and BMX scenes before, at just 17, he began hopping freight trains and photographing the drifters and outcasts he met on the rails. Those images became A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2013), a groundbreaking book that launched his career. After that early success, Brodie walked away from the art world to become a diesel mechanic. Now, age 40, with a son, he reunites with longtime collaborator Paul Schiek ( TBW Books) to publish Failing and reflects with Sasha on his journey, the challenges of early fame, and what it means to return to photography on his own terms.
https://www.instagram.com/mikebrodie_thepolaroidkidd
https://www.twinpalms.com/products/mike-brodie-failing
Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity touched down more than a decade ago, 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 world as suddenly and mysteriously as he’d first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he says. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.” In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light.
Vince Aletti - Episode 98
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by legendary photo critic, curator, and collector Vince Aletti. Vince reflects on his early days as a music critic for Rolling Stone before joining …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by legendary photo critic, curator, and collector Vince Aletti. Vince reflects on his early days as a music critic for Rolling Stone before joining the Village Voice as an arts editor, where he also began writing about photography. Later, as the photography critic at The New Yorker, Vince became a deeply admired voice in the field. Photographers hoped he would write about their work because his reviews were always perceptive, beautifully written, and profoundly generous of spirit. Sasha and Vince also revisit a personal milestone: Vince was the first critic to review an exhibition at Sasha’s gallery, featuring photographs by the late Paul McDonough—a review that helped launch both Paul’s career and Sasha’s as a gallerist. In addition, they explore Vince’s unparalleled collection of photo ephemera, a lifelong passion that has not only preserved vital archives of lesser-known work but has also inspired acclaimed photobooks and exhibitions.
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/vince-aletti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Aletti
Vince Aletti is a writer and curator based in New York City. His writings on music and photography have been published widely. Between 1973 and 1978 Aletti wrote a highly prescient weekly column on the emerging disco scene for Record World magazine, and between 1987 and 2005 he was the art editor and photography critic for The Village Voice. His writings have also appeared in The New Yorker, Artforum, and Vogue Italia, among many other publications. His book Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines was published by Phaidon in 2019. The Drawer was published by Self Publish, Be Happy in September 2022 and went on to win the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook of the Year award. An exhibition at White Columns inspired by The Drawer in 2024 was Aletti's fifth collaboration with the gallery, following on from his 2008 exhibition Male: Work from the Collection of Vince Aletti; the 2014 exhibition of Robert Kitchen’s work, and the 2019 exhibition of Ed Baynard’s work (both curated by Aletti); and the 2008 White Columns publication of Aletti’s collected writings on disco, Disco File, which was subsequently republished in an expanded edition by DJ History/D.A.P.
Born 1945, Philadelphia
- Rolling Stone contributor (1970–1989); first mainstream writer on disco (1973)
- Record World weekly disco columnist (1974–1979)
- Senior Editor, Photo Critic & Art Editor, The Village Voice (~1987–2005)
- Contributor, The New Yorker (2005–2016): weekly exhibition reviews in Goings on About Town
- Various publications: Artforum, Aperture, Photograph, Vogue Italia, FOAM, System
Daniel Arnold | Episode 97
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer Daniel Arnold joined Sasha for a candid conversation about the upsides and downsides of social media success. Daniel reflected on the joy and …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer Daniel Arnold joined Sasha for a candid conversation about the upsides and downsides of social media success. Daniel reflected on the joy and fulfillment he experienced during the height of his online popularity, while also acknowledging the need to move beyond curating a public persona. They also discussed his forthcoming book, You Are What You Do (Loose Joints). Though Daniel had a strong instinct to maintain control over his work, he came to appreciate how working with an editor—bringing in a more objective eye—could open the work up to new ideas and take it in directions he might not have pursued on his own.
Special Request: As we approach our 100th episode, we're both thrilled to reach this milestone and deeply grateful to our extraordinary guests and YOU, our dedicated listeners.
In the coming months, we'll be sharing reflections on how the podcast has evolved over the past five years and highlighting memorable past episodes. Most importantly, we want to hear from you!
We'd love for you to share what the PhotoWork Podcast means to you:
What has the PhotoWork podcast meant to you? How has it influenced your relationship with photography? Which episode resonated with you most? What's the most valuable lesson you've learned?
Send your audio messages (1 minute max) or written thoughts to [email protected] with the subject line "Episode 100" Please include your first name and location in both audio and written messages!
Selected submissions will be featured in our special 100th episode, and EVERYONE who participates will be entered to win exclusive PhotoWork appreciation gifts.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arnold_daniel/
https://loosejoints.biz/collections/forthcoming/products/you-are-what-you-do
Daniel Arnold (b. 1980, USA) is a New York-based photographer whose candid, street-level images capture the unfiltered rhythms of urban life. His recent solo exhibitions include Dante’s Inverno at The Little House, Los Angeles, New York Life at New York Life Gallery, New York and Nothing at Larrie Gallery, New York. Arnold's photography appears regularly in publications including The New York Times, Vogue, and Interview, among others. In 2022, Elara Press published his first monograph entitled Pickpocket. A new collection of photos entitled You Are What You Do will be released in November of 2025 by Loose Joints.
Sage Sohier - Episode 96
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer and educator Sage Sohier joins Sasha to discuss a lifetime of extraordinary work, including her recently published books Passing Time and Americans …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, photographer and educator Sage Sohier joins Sasha to discuss a lifetime of extraordinary work, including her recently published books Passing Time and Americans Seen (Nazraeli Press), featuring photographs made primarily in the 1980s. They also delve into Witness to Beauty (Kehrer Verlag), an intimate and moving portrait of Sohier’s mother alongside her two daughters—a project that embraces aging and the passage of time. Throughout the conversation, Sage shares her enthusiasm and thoughtful insights on staying open to new ideas and equipment, as well as the value of revisiting older work with fresh eyes.
https://www.instagram.com/sagesohier/
Sage Sohier (b. 1954, Washington, D.C.) grew up in Virginia and received her BA from Harvard University in 1975. She is a Boston-based photographer who has published eight monographs, including “Americans Seen,” (Nazraeli Press 2017 and 2024), “Passing Time,” (2023), and “Witness to Beauty” (Kehrer 2017). She is the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
Sohier’s work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the International Center of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago, and in solo shows at Joseph Bellows Gallery, Robert Klein Gallery, Foley Gallery, Blue Sky Gallery, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her work is in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. She has taught photography at Harvard University and Wellesley College, and has done commissioned work for the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency program in Captiva, FL, as well as editorial work for numerous publications
Dana Lixenberg | Episode 95
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, renowned photographer Dana Lixenberg discusses the power of portraiture and how editorial autonomy enabled her to safeguard the portrayal of individuals featured in …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, renowned photographer Dana Lixenberg discusses the power of portraiture and how editorial autonomy enabled her to safeguard the portrayal of individuals featured in her work within marginalized communities. Lixenberg shares the origins of Imperial Courts, her seminal project documenting life in the Los Angeles housing project of the same name, and the deep relationship of trust she built over more than two decades of work there. The conversation also explores her iconic portraits of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, as well as her poignant book project, The Last Days of Shishmaref, which captures the lives of an Indigenous community on a disappearing Alaskan island.
https://grimmgallery.com/artists/42-dana-lixenberg/
https://www.instagram.com/danalixenberg
Dana Lixenberg is known for her stripped-down portraits that revel in the elemental characteristics of her subjects. She uses a large-format field camera – a cumbersome tool, which necessitates what the artist refers to as a ‘slow dance’ between her and her subjects. The resulting portraits contain an enormous amount of detail and texture, and are as revelatory as a personal encounter. The power of the work arises from its intimacy, compositional rigor and, importantly, the absence of social stereotyping. Lixenberg has been predominantly active in the United States, and her thorough understanding of the country and its society seeps through palpably in her work.
Besides her extensive editorial practice, for which she photographed many cultural icons, she pursues long-term projects with a primary focus on marginalized communities. These projects include Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), a collection of landscapes and portraits of a small town’s homeless population and The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), which portrays an Inupiaq community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska. Lixenberg’s most extensive body of work to date is Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 (2015), which she begun in the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King riots. Spanning 22 years, the project tracks the changing shape of an underserved community in Watts, Los Angeles. In contrast to the often one dimensional, sensationalized media coverage of this neighborhood, Lixenberg employs a more subdued and collaborative photographic approach. Like her other projects, Imperial Courts consists of a series of photographs and a publication. Exploring other media for the first time, Lixenberg also included audio recordings and created a three-channel video installation. The project was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2017 and continues to be exhibited internationally.
Justine Kurland | Marina Chao - Episode 94
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha welcomes two extraordinary guests: artist and curator Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, a curator at CPW. Together, they discuss their collaboration on The …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha welcomes two extraordinary guests: artist and curator Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, a curator at CPW. Together, they discuss their collaboration on The Rose, an exhibition that explores collage as a feminist form, strategy, and genealogy. Featuring works by over fifty contemporary artists and key figures from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition examines collage as both a means of world-building and a survival strategy in times of crisis. Sasha, Justine, and Marina delve into the layered responsibilities of artists and discuss the assumption that interpreting a straightforward photograph is inherently simpler than reading and interpreting conceptual art.
https://www.justinekurland.com
https://cpw.org/exhibition/the-rose/
Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation.
Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She works with Higher Pictures in New York.
Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for Seeing Meaning, a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.
Harlan Bozeman - Episode 93
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha sits down with photographer Harlan Bozeman to discuss his artistic evolution—from the casual nature of street photography to the immersive, collaborative, and …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha sits down with photographer Harlan Bozeman to discuss his artistic evolution—from the casual nature of street photography to the immersive, collaborative, and activist approach he brings to his ongoing documentary series, Out the E. They also explore his newer project, Failure to Appear, a more introspective and formally abstract investigation into memory and Black culture. Harlan is thoughtful, honest, and generous as he reflects on both the triumphs and challenges of his complex artistic practice.
https://www.harlanbozeman.com/https://www.instagram.com/harlanbozeman/
Harlan Bozeman is an artist based in Central Arkansas, whose work confronts the erasure of Black legacies and centers on how this exploration influences one’s personhood. He received his M.F.A at the University of Arkansas, his Bachelor’s in Journalism at DePaul University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Harlan is a 2024 Catch Light Global Fellow and is currently participating in the Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories fellowship. Harlan Bozeman is Professor of Practice at Tulane University.
Jamel Shabazz - Episode 92
In this episode of PhotoWork, host Sasha Wolf has a deeply moving conversation with renowned photographer Jamel Shabazz. They talk about his lifelong love for photography and how he uses it to make a social …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork, host Sasha Wolf has a deeply moving conversation with renowned photographer Jamel Shabazz. They talk about his lifelong love for photography and how he uses it to make a social impact. Jamel opens up about how his life experiences have shaped his approach to art and hard work. The episode also covers his book, “A Time Before Crack,” and its importance to his community at the time. It's a heartfelt conversation that goes beyond just photography. Tune in to hear the insights and stories from a photographer passionate about making a difference.
https://www.jamelshabazzphotographer.com ||| https://www.instagram.com/jamelshabazz/
Jamel Shabazz is best known for his iconic photographs of New York City during the 1980s. A documentary, fashion, and street photographer, he has authored 12 monographs and contributed to over three dozen other photography related books. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide and his work is housed within the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Fashion Institute of Technology, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty Museum.
Over the years, Shabazz has instructed young students at the Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Expanding the Walls” project, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture “Teen Curator’s” program, and the Bronx Museum’s “Teen Council.” He is also the 2018 recipient of the Gordon Parks award for excellence in the arts and humanitarianism and the 2022 awardee of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl book prize. Jamel is also a member of the photo collective Kamoinge, and a board member of En Foco, another photo collective. His goal as an artist is to contribute to the preservation of world history and culture.
Christopher McCall - Episode 91
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, join host Sasha Wolf and returning guest Christopher McCall as they reflect on the legacy of the renowned Pier 24 Photography space located on San Francisco’s …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, join host Sasha Wolf and returning guest Christopher McCall as they reflect on the legacy of the renowned Pier 24 Photography space located on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Together, they celebrate the space's 14-year history, during which it showcased the Pilara Foundation's collection, hosted 13 historic exhibitions, and organized numerous public programs. Chris discusses his future endeavors to explore global photography trends while engaging in a heartfelt conversation with Sasha about the enduring allure of photography and photo books in the United States. They also explore budding opportunities for photographers to create and share their own artistic spaces. This episode is filled with reflection, inspiration, and forward-looking insights.
https://pier24.org ||
https://www.instagram.com/thechrismccallChristopher McCall was the Director of Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, one of the largest exhibition spaces devoted to the medium. In 2002 McCall received an MFA in photography from California College of the Arts, studying under Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan. After teaching for seven years, he joined Pier 24 Photography in 2009 as the founding director, assisting in the conceptualization of the organization’s mission and operating principles. After opening the doors of Pier 24 in 2010, McCall oversaw the presentation of thirteen exhibitions and spearheaded the creation of the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program, a collaboration with California College of the Arts.
Bryan Schutmaat - Episode 90
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha reunites with her very first guest on PhotoWork, the photographer and publisher, Bryan Schutmaat. Bryan and Sasha talk about his new book, Sons of the Living …
Show notes
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha reunites with her very first guest on PhotoWork, the photographer and publisher, Bryan Schutmaat. Bryan and Sasha talk about his new book, Sons of the Living (Trespasser) and Bryan's love of being on the road and exploring the American Landscape. Sasha and Bryan also discuss how the idea of collaboration in portraiture may be misrepresented and how a book doesn't mean a body of work comes to an end.
https://www.bryanschutmaat.co https://trespasser.co/shop/sons-of-the-living
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He co-founded the imprint, Trespasser.
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