For many months we asked photographers to send us a piece of audio no longer than five minutes in length to include on our A Photographic Life podcast. These became a book which is now out of print but remain in audio form within the podcast archive, available wherever you get your podcasts . However, we are responding to listener requests and offering transcriptions of some of our favourite contributions. Enjoy!
Vinca Petersen got her first camera at the age of seven or eight. In 1990, age 17, she moved to London, moved into a squat, and got involved in alternative politics as well as the rave/free party scene. She adopted a nomadic lifestyle travelling Europe, living in trucks until her son was born in 2005. Throughout, this time she took photographs, eventually collecting them into a book, No System published in 1999 and reissued in 2019, when it was included in one of the first ever displays of photo books at Tate Modern, London. In 2010, Petersen created Future Youth Project, working with children, where provision for children with learning difficulties has been limited. Recent photo books include Future Fantasy examining her earliest years during the second summer of love and Deuce and a Quarter, created during a road trip across the American South. Vinca has participated in multiple group exhibitions and solo exhibitions of images and has never worked to commission.
“The simplest way of explaining what photography means to me is it is a way of recording, recording what is unfolding in front of me. How I’m feeling and who is important to me. I don’t set up my photos or influence the scenes in them, it’s more personal than a lot of photographers work. I suppose in the sense that I don’t really see myself as a photographer in the same way that a photographer that will set up a scene or set out to photograph a particular subject. To me, that has never been important. The camera is one of a few different ways that I record what is going on and where I have put myself. I take my life in particular directions then record it, partly photographically.
I’ve also always written diaries and collected small totems, mementos, along the way, not many objects, mainly photographs. Photography is an essential tool for me and always a very honest one. A very direct way of capturing a huge amount of information. Not only the image itself but what that image then triggers in my mind as secondary memories such as smells and relationships now and then. Whether they are even still here anymore. I always used to laugh about the photographs I took when I was living in a live-in vehicle on the road and that I could remember a series of important things from the time the photograph was taken. For example, what truck I was living in out of the five I’ve had over the years, which dog I had, which boyfriend I had. Those things could not be in the photo but the photo would trigger the memory.
I don’t have a very good memory and I often think I remember things because of the photographs. They are the catalyst for remembering the whole of a moment. I have always struggled with being called a photographer, I think photography is part of what I am, but I feel less of a pure photographer and more someone, maybe there is not a word for it, that records things and preserves them.”
© Grant Scott 2026
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