020 - Chloe Dewe Mathews
© Chloe Dewe Mathews
After taking a degree in Fine Art at Oxford University, Chloe Dewe Mathews worked in the film industry for four years before making the switch to photography. In a relatively short period of time she established herself as a one of those young talents to watch.
Her subject matter has been diverse, from holidaying Hasidic Jews at the Welsh seaside to Uzbek gravediggers on the Caspian coast. In 2010 she spent nine months travelling extensively around China and the Caspian Sea region of central Asia where she worked on stories on the indiginous Uighur population of Xingiang in western China, the ecological disaster that is the Aral sea, and the rapidly developing, oil rich country of Azerbaijhan.
More recently Chloe was commissioned by her alma mater, Ruskin College of Art, Oxford, to produce a body of work that would mark the centenary of the First World War. The resulting project, Shot At Dawn, explores the sombre, often overlooked and sometimes controversial subject of the one thousand British, French and Belgian soldiers who were executed by firing squad for cowardice or dissertion between 1914 and 1918. The images she made, of the exact locations of some of these executions, as well as being extensively exhibited, became Chloe's first book, published by Ivorypress.
In 2014 she was awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University's Peabody Museum which will eventually result in a book of her work from the Caspian Sea. Chloe has also been awarded the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award, the Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award by the Magenta Foundation and the BJP International Photography Award. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally.
In episode 020, Chloe discusses:
From fine art to the movie business
The transition to photography
A trip through central Asia
Being self critical
Photo book recommendation: Sequester by Awoiska Van Der Molen
Her ongoing project about the River Thames
“When I first got into documentary photography there were all these people saying ‘the time has past’ and all this stuff. I never knew that time so it doesn’t bother me! We all have to make the most of where we are now.”
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