

PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf
Sasha Wolf / Real Photo Show
From the PhotoWork Foundation, the PhotoWork Podcast, hosted by Sasha Wolf, features in-depth conversations with influential figures in the fine art photography world, including photographers, curators, and publishers. Through personal and insightful discussions, the podcast serves as a vital resource for artists, students, and professionals—offering inspiration, education, and a platform for anyone passionate about photography.
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 most often not commercially viable but is essential to the collective understanding of what it looks like to be living in society today.
To learn more about the podcast, see additional content related to individual episodes and other opportunities for artists visit: www.photowork.foundation and follow us on Instagram @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 most often not commercially viable but is essential to the collective understanding of what it looks like to be living in society today.
To learn more about the podcast, see additional content related to individual episodes and other opportunities for artists visit: www.photowork.foundation and follow us on Instagram @photowork.foundation.
Episodes
Mentioned books

6 snips
Dec 1, 2022 • 1h
Curran Hatleberg - Rewind to Episode 35
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, we revisit episode 35 where Sasha and photographer Curran Hatleberg discuss his journey from studying painting in undergrad to receiving his MFA in photography at Yale. They discuss his upcoming monograph due out this spring in 2022, as well as the books he's already published, as solo monographs and in concert with his partner, the artist Cynthia Daignault. They drill down on the importance of working collaboratively, both with his photographic subjects, as well as with his wider support group.
https://curranhatleberg.com
https://tbwbooks.com/products/rivers-dream
Curran Hatleberg received his MFA from Yale University in 2010. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, Higher Pictures, and Fraenkel Gallery. Hatleberg has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Yale University and Cooper Union. He is the recipient of a 2020 Maryland State Arts Council Grant, a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant, a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant, and the 2010 Richard Benson Prize for excellence in photography. Hatleberg’s work is held in various museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, KADIST, the Center for Contemporary Photography, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016. Somewhere Someone, a collaborative artist book with Cynthia Daignault, was released by Hassla Books in fall 2017. His second monograph, will be published by TBW Books in 2021.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Nov 17, 2022 • 54min
David Benjamin Sherry - Episode 52
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, David Benjamin Sherry have a deeply personal and moving conversation about the decisions and influences that lead David to pursue photography and to work in the uniquely exuberant and process forward manner that he does.
https://davidbenjaminsherry.com
David Benjamin Sherry (Santa Fe, NM) is an artist whose work is both challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition. His work revolves around interests in environmentalism, queer identity and alternative analog film processes. He’s best known for his colorful landscape work, brought upon by the desire to explore the last remaining wilderness in America. Through numerous projects, Sherry’s work expresses deep concern for the rapidly changing environment, while continuing to sustain a queer sensibility in the hetero-male dominated canon of landscape photography. Sherry has referred to himself as a “nostalgic futurist” and currently uses a large format 8x10 film camera in order to reflect and understand our connection within the contemporary American landscape.
Sherry was born in 1981 in Stony Brook, NY and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received his BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. Sherry taught Western Landscape and Large Format photography as a distinguished faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. In the fall of 2020, joined the Yale MFA Photography program as a Visiting Critic.
A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York, a survey show organized by Klaus Biesenbach Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations including: The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum (2011), New York Minute at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), Out of Focus at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), Lost Line, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), What is a Photograph? at ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014) Color Fields at MassArt Museum (2015) and Ansel Adams In Our Time, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018).
His work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, The Saatchi Collection, London, UK, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL, and The Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
Sherry’s work has been featured in many prominent international publications, including Artforum, Aperture Magazine, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. In September 2014, his work was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In the spring of 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Aperture Magazine for the Earth issue.
There are four monographs of his work: It’s Time (Damiani, 2010); Quantum Light (Damiani, 2013); Earth Changes (Mörel Books, 2015) and his most recent monograph, “American Monuments” (Radius, 2019) features essays by top environmentalists and activists Terry Tempest Williams and Bill McKibben.
David Benjamin Sherry is represented by Salon 94 Gallery, New York and Morán Morán Gallery, Los Angeles.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Nov 3, 2022 • 43min
Raymond Meeks - Episode 51
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Raymond Meeks have a very open and frank conversation about staying true to yourself as an artist while also exploring new ways of making work. Ray talks about how he started in photography and it is a beautiful and moving origin story.
http://www.raymondmeeks.com
https://www.mackbooks.us/products/somersault-br-raymond-meeks?_pos=1&_sid=9a0d89916&_ss=r
Raymond Meeks (Ohio) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence. His books have been described as a field or vertical plane for examining interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events—often years apart—unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.
Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bibliotheque Nationale, France, and the George Eastman House, with recent solo exhibitions at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco and Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam. Raymond Meeks is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. He will be mentored by David Campany, artistic director of the ICP, and will carry out his residency in France in 2022.
Raymond Meeks is a 2020 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Oct 20, 2022 • 57min
Paul Schiek - Episode 50
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and publisher and founder of TBW Books, Paul Schiek, have a real insiders' discussion about working with artists and the trust they look for when creating that relationship. Paul talks about what he looks for when deciding whether or not to publish a book and he reveals his approach to the business side of publishing which is not all about business.
https://tbwbooks.com
Born in Fond du Lac, WI, Paul Schiek received a BFA in photography from California College of the Arts and Crafts in 2005, after which he started the publishing company TBW Books. Since then, Schiek’s work has been shown both in the US and internationally. His work has also been the subject of many books and publications.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Oct 6, 2022 • 50min
Aaron Schuman - Episode 49
To start off season 3 of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, writer, curator and educator, Aaron Schuman discuss Aaron's monographs including, SLANT and his latest, SONATA, both published by MACK. Aaron reveals how he was approached to create a Masters program at the University of the West of England and how the idea of research is more than just a singular conscious effort to pursue an idea but a lifelong endeavor that permeates your work.
https://www.aaronschuman.com/index.html
AARON SCHUMAN is an American photographer, writer, curator and educator based in the United Kingdom. He received a BFA in Photography and History of Art from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999, and an MA in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of London: London Consortium at Birkbeck College in 2003.
Schuman is the author of several critically-acclaimed monographs: SONATA, published by MACK in the summer of 2022; SLANT, published by MACK, which was cited as one of 2019's "Best Photobooks" by numerous photographers, critics and publications, including The Guardian, Internazionale, American Suburb X, Photoeye (Jason Fulford / Rebecca Norris Webb), Photobookstore (Vanessa Winship / Mark Power / Robin Titchener), and Deadbeat Club Press (Raymond Meeks / Brad Feuerhelm); and FOLK, published by NB Books, which was cited as one of 2016's "Best Photobooks" by Alec Soth (Photoeye), Sean O'Hagan (The Guardian), and Jason Fulford (TIME), and was long-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2017.
His work has been exhibited internationally - at institutions such as Tate Modern, Hauser & Wirth, Christie's London, Christie's New York, the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, the Ethnographic Museum Krakow, Format Festival and elsewhere - and is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The British Library, the National Art Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library.
In addition to to his own photographic work, Schuman has contributed essays, interviews, texts and photographs to many other books and monographs, including Matteo Giovanni: I Had to Shed My Skin (Artphilein, 2022), OK No Response (Twin Palms, 2021), Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes' Unseen Photograph (Schilt, 2021), Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), Amak Mahmoodian: Zanjir (RRB, 2019), Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018), Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (Prestel / Barbican, 2018), George Rodger: Nuba & Latuka, The Colour Photographs: The Color Photographs (Prestel, 2017), Alec Soth: Gathered Leaves (MACK, 2015), Visions Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts (University of California Press, 2015), Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals (Prestel / Carnegie Museum, 2014) and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014), amongst many others. He has also written and photographed for a wide variety of journals, magazines and publications, such as Aperture, Foam, ArtReview, Frieze, Magnum Online, Hotshoe, The British Journal of Photography and more.
Schuman has curated several major international festivals and exhibitions, including: In Progress: Laia Abril, Hoda Afshar, Widline Cadet, Adama Jalloh, Alba Zari (Royal Photographic Society, 2021), Indivisible: New American Documents (FOMU Antwerp, 2016), In Appropriation (Houston Center of Photography, 2012), Other I: Alec Soth, WassinkLundgren, Viviane Sassen (Hotshoe London, 2011), and Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs (FotoFest, 2010). In 2018, he served as co-Curator of JaipurPhoto Festival 2018. In 2014, he served as Guest Curator of Krakow Photomonth 2014 - entitled Re:Search, the main programme featured solo exhibitions by Taryn Simon, Trevor Paglen, David Campany / Walker Evans, Clare Strand, Forensic Architecture, Jason Fulford and more.
Schuman was the founder and editor of the online photography journal, SeeSaw Magazine (2004-2014).
He is Associate Professor in Photography and Visual Culture, and the founder and Programme Leader of the MA/Masters in Photography programme, at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Jul 28, 2022 • 58min
Paul Graham - Episode 48
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Paul Graham discuss his self-taught beginnings in photography and what it's like to see your work become historical with the passage of time. Paul and Sasha talk about Paul's more recent, and more personal, work and Paul shares his thoughts on the ethics of photographing outside of one's own community. They discuss these topics and many more in this season ending episode of the podcast.
https://www.paulgrahamarchive.com
https://www.mackbooks.us/search?q=Graham%2C+Paul&type=product
Paul Graham has played an essential role in dissolving the barriers between the worlds of documentary and fine art photography. Starting in the early 1980s, Graham’s use of color in the role traditionally occupied by black-and-white documentary was a radical challenge to the unwritten rules of engaged photography. Troubled Land (on the Northern Ireland conflict) and Beyond Caring (addressing unemployment in the time of Margaret Thatcher) shifted the debate on how such issues could be visually articulated. With an extraordinarily long and active career of four decades, Graham has published eighteen monographs and three survey books. He moved to New York in 2002, and has worked in the United States since then. Most notably, a shimmer of possibility was published as a set of twelve books and presented as a solo exhibition at MoMA, New York. He is represented by Pace Gallery in the United States, and galleries in London and Berlin.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Jul 14, 2022 • 56min
D'Angelo Lovell Williams - Episode 47
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha talks to photographer, D'Angelo Lovell Williams about the experiences they had at the various art schools they attended as well as their rapid ascent in the art world at large after joining the roster of Higher Pictures Generation gallery. D'Angelo has a new brand new book out with Mack Books, Contact High, and they touch on many of the images in this new monograph.
https://www.dangelolovellwilliams.com
https://www.mackbooks.us/products/contact-high-br-d-angelo-lovell-williams
D’Angelo Lovell Williams (b. 1992, Jackson, Mississippi) is a Black, HIV-positive artist expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. They earned their BFA in photography from Memphis College of Art in 2015, an MFA in photography from Syracuse University in 2018, and are a 2018 Skowhegan School of Art alum. They live and work in New York City. D'Angelo Lovell Williams has had four solo exhibitions with Higher Pictures in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. The 2020 exhibition, Papa Don't Preach, was presented in collaboration with Janice Guy at her gallery in Harlem.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Jun 30, 2022 • 51min
Wendy Red Star - Episode 46
Photographer Wendy Red Star discusses creating meaningful work that doesn't have to explain everything, excitement over her first monograph, and upcoming exhibitions and book awards. She reflects on uncovering history through art and recreating natural history dioramas. The importance of detail and symbolism in artwork is also highlighted.

Jun 16, 2022 • 43min
Mimi Plumb - Episode 45
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Mimi Plumb talk about the experience of organizing and editing work from over 30 years ago into books that are meaningful and relevant today. They also discuss the political and autobiographical nature of Mimi's work and how that still motivates her to make work today.
https://www.mimiplumb.com
https://www.instagram.com/mimi_plumb/
Aperture PhotoBook Club with Wendy Red Star: https://aperture.org/events/aperture-photobook-club-wendy-red-star-delegation/
Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West.
In the 1970s, Plumb explored subjects ranging from her suburban roots to the United Farm Workers movement in the fields as they organized for union elections. Her first book, Landfall, published by TBW Books in 2018, is a collection of her images from the 1980s, a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, was published by Stanley/Barker in September 2020. The Golden City, her third book, published by Stanley/Barker in March 2022, focuses on her many years living in San Francisco.
Plumb is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. She has received grants and fellowships from the California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography, and the Marin Arts Council. Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Plumb received her MFA in Photography from SFAI in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976.
Born in Berkeley, and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, Mimi Plumb has served on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

8 snips
Jun 2, 2022 • 55min
Ron Jude - Episode 44
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Ron Jude discuss his most recent book 12Hz as well as some of his previous publications, Alpine Star, Emmett and Lick Creek Line. Ron talks about his inclination to create unsentimental photographic works while keeping within the traditional practice of photography and his drive to bend and upend narrative structure.
https://www.ronjude.com
https://www.instagram.com/ron_jude/
Ron Jude’s recent work explores the relationship between place, memory, and narrative through multiple approaches ranging from the use of appropriated images to photographs that echo traditional documentary methodologies.
Jude earned a BFA in studio art from Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, in 1988, and an MFA from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1992. His photographs have been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and are held in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Jude is the author of twelve books, including Emmett (2010); Lick Creek Line (2012); Lago (2015); Nausea (2017); and, most recently, 12Hz (2020). He has received grants or awards from Light Work; San Francisco Camerawork; /Users/mcd/Desktop/1-Pods/PhotoWork/44 Ron Jude/text.txtthe Aaron Siskind Foundation; and the Friends of Photography and was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2019.He is a professor of art at University of Oregon and lives in Eugene with Danielle Mericle and their son Charley.
Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co