In episode 42 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the sacrifices photographers make to create work and the commitment required from friends and family to support those dedicated to the medium.
You can read the full article featuring Don McCullin and Giles Duley mentioned in this week’s podcast here www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/03/don-mccullin-giles-duley-photography-retrospective-tate-interview
Plus this week photographer Brian Griffin takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’
Brian Griffin was born in 1948 and lives and works in London. Considered “the photographer of the decade” by The Guardian in 1989, “the most unpredictable and influential British portrait photographer of the last decades” by the British Journal of Photography in 2005 and “one of Britain’s most influential photographers” by the World Photography Organisation in 2015, Brian has worked as a freelance photographer, filmmaker and TV commercials and music video film director since 1972.
Brian Griffin has published over thirty books and was awarded the Best Photography book in the World at the Barcelona Primavera Fotografica 1991. Life magazine used his photograph A Broken Frame on the front cover of its supplement The Greatest Photographs Of The 80’s. In 1991, after twenty years, he “walked away from photography” and began a career creating advertising commercials and music videos. He returned to photography in 2002 and has had more than fifteen solo shows and four retrospectives since. Brian has won many awards including four ‘Most Outstanding Awards’ from the D&AD (Design and Art Direction), and the ‘Freedom of the City of Arles, France’. He won the ‘Best Commercial of the Year’ at the Bafta Academy awards in 1992 and his short movie Claustrofoamia received the ‘Golden Monkey Award’ for Best Film at the Mons International Short Film Festival in Belgium and the ‘Certificate of Merit’ at the Chicago International Film Festival, both in 1995.
In 2009, Brian Griffin became the patron of the Derby Festival of Photography and continues to be the Festivals patron. In September 2013, he received the ‘Centenary Medal’ from the Royal Photographic Society in recognition of a lifetime achievement in photography. In 2014, he received an Honorary Doctorate by Birmingham City University for his lifetime contribution to the City of Birmingham. Brian Griffin’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of major art institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain, London; the British Council, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the Art Museum Reykjavik, Iceland; the Mast Foundation, Bologna; and the Museu da Imagem, Braga, Portugal. www.briangriffin.co.uk
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Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer in Professional Photography at the University of Gloucestershire, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n’ Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry.
His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay has been screened across the UK and the US in 2018 and will be screened in the US and Canada in 2019.
© Grant Scott 2019