In this week’s episode photographer, Alex Majoli takes on our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’…

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust. Proust answered the questionnaire in a confession album, a form of parlour game popular at the end of the 1890s. The album, titled An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.was found in 1924 and published in the French literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois. Our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’ is an adaption of the original text.

Alex Majoli
Majoli was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1971 and attended the Art Institute in Ravenna. His career began to develop after he photographed the closing of the notorious insane asylum on the island of Leros in Greece, which resulted in his first monograph, Leros. This arose due to his interest in the theories of Franco Basaglia, a pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, famous for having abolished psychiatric hospitals in Italy. Majoli’s early interest in psychiatric care led him to Brazil, which marked the beginning of his twenty-year-long, ongoing project, Tudo Bom, a body of work documenting the multi-layered country, and the extremes found in the darker side of its society. The experience of photographing people in all kinds of circumstances led him to explore the idea that everyone is an actor in their own life. This is why he started the ongoing project, Scene in which his images become scenes in which people, through their performances, express themselves in what becomes a film set or a theater stage. The thin line between fact and fiction, documentary and art, human behavior and acting provides the kind of friction that keeps him returning to the places where the human condition is called into question. Majoli’s work is held in various public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, MUFOCO and Mucem. Among many honours, he has received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellowship for Humanistic Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an ICP Infinity Award, a Getty Images Grant. He was NPPA Photographer of the Year and received an OPC Feature Photography Award. His books include One Vote (2004), Libera Me (2010), Congo (2015), Andante (2018), Scene (2019) and Opera Aperta (2021). Majoli joined Magnum Photos in 1996, becoming a full member in 2001 and lives in New York. www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/alex-majoli/

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 continues to work as a photographer, writer and filmmaker and is the Subject Coordinator for both undergraduate and post graduate study of photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England.

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

© Grant Scott 2026

Image: Greece. Lesbos. 2015. Moria refugee camp. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos