In episode 320 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his garage reflecting on the small and big things that impact on the everyday engagement we all have with photography.

Mentioned in this episode:
www.vivianmaier.com

Image: Vivienne Maier, Self-Portrait, 1953

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018.

Scott’s book Inside Vogue HouseOne building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is now on sale.

© Grant Scott 2024


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10 responses to “PODCAST: A Photographic Life, Episode 320 ‘Vivienne Maier, Analogue Smartphones and Artist or Journalist?’”

  1. Not after the final word, but this occurred just now based on your prior reply. Our difference seems to be that you need/require a narrative as a part of your experience of art or photography, and I do not. Sometimes the aesthetic is enough for me, the “pretty thing”.

    1. I never get much nourishment from candy floss. Either visual or physical.

  2. Not everyone needs to be a Magnum type journalistic/documentary photographer. Making “pretty things”, as you called them, worked quite well for Siskind, Callahan, White and Gibson, thank you very much. The “what’s the story” gatekeepers of today’s photography world are tiresome. Sometimes there is just an image, taken to “see what something looks like photographed.”

    1. I think you missed my point. All photographs have narrative if they are considered and not just focused on aesthetic.

      1. I don’t think I did. You just proved my point by using the word “narrative.” Abstract photography, like abstract art, can be just as “considered”, and still stand on its own without attachment to some theory of narrative.

      2. Thank you for telling me what my point is. All art is narrative. You just have to look harder.

      3. No, we just disagree, which is something I thought you were fond of. Untitled art, which is usually abstract in nature, has no narrative by intention. It may create an internal narrative, or it may just conjure emotion or feeling by the colors, shapes or the aesthetic. At least that is what I experience when I “look closer”. Cheers!

      4. I do but even abstract is narrative. Just speak to the artist.

      5. Take care!

      6. I always do

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