28th May 2025

© Craig Easton

THIS WEEK ON A SMALL VOICE PODCAST MEMBER-ONLY EPISODE...

First, a check-in with my guest from episode 154 of A Small Voice, Craig Easton. I caught up with Craig at Photo London recently where we talked about his forthcoming book project with GOST, An Extremely Un-get-atable Place, which is very nearly fully funded on Kickstarter (campaign ends 6th June).

Second, last week's guest Marc Wilson returns to tackle the bonus questions.

This week's sample question: 
Answer either of these (or both, if you like): What are you hopes for the future? / Are you happy? 

"So, my hopes for the future are, you know, obviously peace in Ukraine. It's nothing to do with photography. My hope is that the Russians fuck off out of Ukraine as quickly as possible, so that I can take my kid there for the first time, so we can go back to my wife's village and swim in the river. So our friends who are photographers and scientists and researchers can put the guns down that they've been given and stop fighting. And so there are friends who are living separate lives, husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends, because the husbands have to stay there to fight, and the girlfriends and wives are off in different countries, and can get back together. So that's my hope for that.

The second part of that question, am I happy? I'm happy to answer because I'm incredibly happy, because I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the world. I've got two fantastic kids. I get to spend my days doing something that I love, making a small difference somewhere. So I am, despite my first answer, the first half of this question, I'm ridiculously happy, and I don't want my life to be in any way different to how it is."

Marc's picks for...

Significant photobook:

• Robert Frank, The Lines Of My Hand

Recent discovery:

• Chris Hoare, Seven Hills

• Michael Ormerod, American Photographs

Favourite photographers:

• Robert Frank

• Christian Boltanski

© Marc Wilson

ALSO...

I can't quite believe that I was unaware - or maybe I just forgot at some point - of the considerable controversy over the circumstances surrounding Robert Capa's hugely famous D-Day landing pictures and the subsequent legendary darkroom drying cabinet disaster that allegedly destroyed all but a handful of now iconic frames. Questions of what is and isn't true have been rumbling on for at least ten years. Timothy Floyd has been keeping close tabs on the counter-narratives put forward and covers the issue in forensic detail in his blog here, coming down strongly in support of Capa's version of events.

The questioning of the widely accepted historical narrative of these famous events always exerts a strange fascination and rarely fails to generate heated debate, as is the case with the recent documentary The Stringer (dir: Bao Nguyen) which questions Nick Ut's authorship of the equally iconic 'Napalm Girl' photograph taken during the Vietnam War. I mentioned this in a previous newsletter and will watch the film with interest as soon as it becomes widely available.

ALSO...

Many congratulations to previous A Small Voice podcast guests Moises Saman and Ivor Prickett, both of whom are 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Moises won in the category of Feature Photography "for his haunting black and white images of Sednaya prison in Syria that capture the traumatic legacy of Assad’s torture chambers, forcing viewers to confront the raw horrors faced by prisoners and contemplate the scars on society." Ivor was part of a New York Times team, headed by Declan Walsh, who won in the category of International Reporting "for their revelatory investigation of the conflict in Sudan, including reporting on foreign influence and the lucrative gold trade fueling it, and chilling forensic accounts of the Sudanese forces responsible for atrocities and famine."

And congratulations also to South African photographer and Magnum Photos member Lindokuhle Sobekwa for winning this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for the book I carry Her photo with Me, published by MACK in 2024.

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