8th January 2025
© Ed Sykes
THIS WEEK ON A SMALL VOICE PODCAST MEMBER-ONLY EPISODE...
Last week's guest Ed Sykes returns to tackle the bonus questions.
This week's sample question:
How do you deal with juggling the need to make a living with finding time to pursue personal projects that don't necessarily earn you any money?
You know, throughout your career, it's gonna be difficult to find the right balance all the time. That balance is always going to be off. I think it's important that when you're not having the time to be creative, that you still have the opportunity to just get moments to note things down, to think, to gather material. So even if you're not making stuff or taking pictures, you can still be finding inspiration and almost, accumulating material that when you do find that time and the balance is right, you're kind of ready to use it rather than just go, 'okay, okay. I'll do something creative now.' ... When you can't be creative, you know, just still be have your eyes open. Listen out for stuff.
Ed's picks for...
Significant Photobook(s):
American Night by Paul Graham
An influential or favourite photographer or photographers:
None chosen
Recent Discovery:
ALSO...
Opening:
Looking forward to Next Wednesday 15th January when a show featuring work from the book Republic by previous A Small Voice guest Seamus Murphy will open at the Leica Gallery, 64-66 Duke Street, London, and be up from the 11th of January until the 6th of March 2025. I love that book, which is Seamus' personal reflection on his own country of Ireland. Here's the blurb from the press release:
Seamus Murphy grew up in Ireland and is currently based in London. Heralded for his extensive international work from Afghanistan, the Middle East, the United States and Russia, he has been widely exhibited and published, with work in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and The Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He is the author of four photography books.
The idea of photographing Ireland started during a trip into Syria with FSA rebels in 2012 – trekking silently for eight hours through regime-held villages under a blanket of darkness left time for reflection. It reminded him of meeting veterans from Ireland’s War of Independence (1919-1921) and Civil War (1922-1923). He had photographed the surviving handful in the late 1990s; the youngest being ninety-seven whilst the oldest was one hundred and five. He equated their experiences with the ones he would later encounter in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Thirty years after leaving Ireland, travelling widely and listening to stories from other countries, he asked himself, what about my own country?
‘A picture I took in 2011 in County Wexford wouldn’t leave me alone. A man rides a horse seated backwards over a steep, tricky hedge. An elegant joke if he manages to stay on, which he does. A glimpse of the comedy we make of life, death and the rules in Ireland. I had a starting point.’
In 2016, the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Rising, Murphy published The Republic, where he turned an affectionate and incisive eye on his own country. Inevitably it was going to be a personal and poetic body of work. On his first trip back through Ireland for the book, he recalled the names of places ‘glimpsed from the back seat of the car on family trips to my father’s home county of Mayo’. He notes in the book’s essay how growing up in Ireland in the 1970s ‘felt like a sideshow, with priests acting as shabby park-wardens, or more seriously, as police’. As a young man he couldn’t wait to leave.
Now after decades as an exile, an escapee and an outsider, Murphy chose to examine what often goes unnoticed or unrecorded, what moved or surprised him.
Forthcoming Documentary:
The VII foundation are behind an intruiging looking documentary entitled The Stringer which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. Details on the precise subject matter are pretty sparse - hence the intruigue - but here's the blurb from the Sundance website:
A two-year investigation uncovers a scandal behind the making of one of the most-recognized photographs of the 20th century. Five decades of secrets are unraveled in the search for justice for a man known only as “the stringer.”
An iconic image defines its time not only through the content of the image itself, but through the stories of its creation and dissemination across culture and around the world. The photograph at the heart of The Stringer embodies this process of enshrinement, but a shadowy, whispered history of the image has been out of frame till now. Director Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night in Pop, 2024 Sundance Film Festival) follows a team of investigators seeking the photo’s true authorship. In doing so they revisit a painful, politically complex past and find people haunted by seemingly small acts that have echoed through the decades and forever changed lives. With surprising revelations and a determined spirit of veracity, The Stringer shows the irreducible power of truth and its demand to be known no matter the consequences.
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