The Messy Truth - Conversations on Photography

In this episode, from my second salon titled, Between Two Worlds which took place in January 2026 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and supported by WePresent. The one day salon is an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how. In this session, On Photography And, Gem Fletcher is joined by Jack Davison, Ronan Mckenzie, and Hanna Moon, three artists who have taken risks in an attempt to create new models of publishing, exhibiting and making. Together they discuss the following questions: What is the state of the photography industry? And how might we retool it for the future? As artists, we have inherited this sprawling, decreasingly functional cultural apparatus known as the photo world. So, what can we do about it? How might we possibly retool or scavenge from its remains to rebuild it anew? Can we imagine new models of making and distribution that address systemic issues? Is it possible to create a more expansive practice with less compromise? And how can we cultivate new community standards that support many, rather than a few? British photographer Jack Davison effortlessly embraces digital, analogue, black and white and colour photography. His works depict the human figure, architecture, animals, objects, landscapes and townscapes; yet his subject is always photography itself. Davison's playful and curious approach is shaped by the equally formative space of online platforms like Flickr and Tumblr, where he first developed his craft as a young man taking pictures in the Essex countryside. Davison had his debut UK solo exhibition at Cob Gallery and a further solo exhibition at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam. His portrait photography is included in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London. He is the founder of the imprint Helions.Ronan Mckenzie is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, curation, and design. Alongside creative still and moving image works for a number of titles and brands including Vogue, Luncheon, Wall Street Journal, Clinique, Glossier and Nike, Ronan continues to work on special projects including designing a chess board for W Budapest, interviewing Carrie Mae Weems for The Barbican, creative direction for musician anaiis, writing for Apartamento and leading educational programmes for Gucci Changemakers. Curatorially, her collaborators include The V&A, The RA, Carl Freedman Gallery, London Design Festival and Somerset House. In addition to working on numerous projects for others, Ronan founded her own gallery and community space HOME (2020-2023), as well as her label SELASI (2020-present). Hanna Moon is an artist, photographer and creative interlocutor, born in South Korea, and based in London. Her first critically-acclaimed contribution to fashion culture was her launch of A Nice Magazine, created by Moon for her graduation from Central St Martins, London, in 2014. Intentionally working with ideas and subjects outside of the conventions of fashion photography, Moon has defined herself as an important new voice in the field.  Moon breathes new life into fashion with her personal narratives and truths, and her acute sense of how to create the visuals of our time.  Follow Hanna, Ronan, Jack & Gem on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com 

In this episode, On Mystery, Gem Fletcher talks to Aspen Mays about her archival interventions and darkroom transgressions that challenges us to reflect upon the profound experience of looking - looking at us and looking at the world. Aspen’s work exists in a myriad of forms, but  what remains consistent through her work is the tension between oppositional forces like irreverence and defiances, the far and the near, construction and deconstruction, knowing and unknowing ,precision and chaos, the ordinary and the exceptional, the visible and the invisible - this is the lifeblood of her work. In short, her innovative practice is about imagining new possibilities of seeing and being.Aspen Mays is an artist whose work investigates photography’s relationship to science, chance, and material transformation. In 2010, Mays was a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. Her publication, Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why?, was shortlisted for the First Photobook Award by the Aperture Foundation in 2016. She took part in the inaugural cohort (2022-2024) of Unseen California, a research initiative inviting artists to engage with the Nature Reserve System of the University of California. Mays is a 2026-2027 Guggenheim Fellow. Honors also include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in 2021 and a Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida in 2025. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Aperture, Foam, The New Yorker and the New York Times. She is represented by Higher Pictures.Follow Aspen @aspenmays & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Naima Green about her exhibition, ‘Instead, I spin fantasies’ presented at ICP in New York in 2025/26. The show, which was curated by Elisabeth Sherman, grapples with the concept of pregnancy and parenthood through constructed self-portraits, landscapes and still-lifes—blurring the line between documentary, performance, construction and vernacular modes. Throughout the work. Green probes the conventional expectations and representational tropes of motherhood, while also creating an expanded space for considering the experience of pregnancy and parenthood in America.Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, installation, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritises the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesising archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.Naima has had solo shows at Astor Weeks, Baxter Street CCNY, and Fotografiska, all NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and Gallery Factory, Minneapolis, MN, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Musuem of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.Follow Naima @naimagreen & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com 

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Daniel Shea about his latest book, Distribution which began with a simple question: how do you photograph a forest?  In this roving conversation they explore the genesis of Distribution while discussing everything from the personal and often painful journey of artmaking to the future of photobooks and much more in between. What is interesting about Daniel's work is his simultaneous desire for order and complexity - essentially offering more rigorous ways to think about how we move through and experience the world. Daniel Shea is an artist based in New York City. He has published a number of books including Distribution, Ex Nihilo and 43-35 10th Street. He has exhibited internationally including at The Pavilion of the United States during the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Foam, Amsterdam, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. He has been a resident artist at Light Work and His photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, Frieze and Fantastic ManFollow Daniel @danielpshea & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Amelia Abraham about her latest book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, where she crafts an expansive visual exploration of queer nightlife in all its many iterations. The book is a love letter to those who went out and stayed out, felt the urge to document or reflect what was happening, or who have used their artmaking to dream new modes of being into existence. The book also asks what our decades-long quest to catalogue and understand nightlife spaces through photography and film can tell us about our various relationships with them, reflecting on the ways that photography intersects with pleasure, politics, and protest.Amelia Abraham is a journalist and author from London. She writes for Art Review, The Guardian, The Observer, Dazed, AnOther, and other titles on arts, culture and more. Her books include Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ+ Rights. Her first edited photography book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, was published this year by MACK Books. Follow Amelia @amelia_abraham & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Ahndraya Parlato about her latest book, TIME TO KILL an interrogation of gendered aging, unpacking the ideals of beauty, caretaking, and maternal and domestic duty imposed on women over the course of their lives. In our roving conversation, we talk about selfhood, motherhood, sacrifice, visibility, censorship, the potency when you get text and image to work as you imagined and what happens to a project after its release. Ahndraya Parlato has a BA from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has published four books: TIME TO KILL [Mack Books 2026] Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon(in collaboration with Gregory Halpern), Études Books, 2014. She has exhibited work at: Spazio Labo, in Bologna, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. Ahndraya has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop, and grants from Light Work, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has been a nominee for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. She has taught in the Bard College and Cornell Image Text MFA programs and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.Follow Ahndraya @Ahndraya_Parlato  & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Chieska Fortune Smith about her journey through photography and the role of collective learning in her practice. She came to photography through Flickr, the social media platform which earnestly engaged so many of us in the medium. It was a place to upload and share your pictures, while getting feedback from other enthusiasts. Chi’s trajectory pivoted when met Brett Walker on the platform, a photographer in his own right, who mentored a group of budding photographers in London. This model of collective learning was formative for Chi and her peers and gave her the foundations of which she continues to build upon today. In our conversation we talk about the different strands of life, culture and influence which inform her work, what keeps her going and how she moves through the photo industry. Chieska Fortune Smith is born of an African-American soul singer and a Japanese classical dancer. Her work is rooted in classical timelessness and stories with twists of obscurity and illusion. She is heavily influenced by street photography and vintage found imagery from the early 20th century. She has featured in prominent magazines and books including Sixteen Journal, Vanity Fair, and designer Simone Rocha’s debut monograph, and is currently working on a personal project that delves into her Japanese and black American roots. She is based in London.Follow Chi @chieskafortunesmith & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

Welcome back. To celebrate reaching the 100th episode of the podcast, I collaborated with the team at the International Centre of Photography in New York City, to host a one day salon. My motivation was to gather the community together in person and start talking about where we stand in photography. Titled, Between Two Worlds, the salon was an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how.Before you dive in, I wanted to share what I told the audience at the salon - there are no tidy or easy answers here. In fact my expectation is that these conversations will involve a lot of complexity and contradiction, but holding space for, and embracing this chaos, is in my opinion, the urgent work that needs to be done. In this episode I discuss the future of storytelling with Kathy RyanFor three decades, Kathy Ryan, the longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, pioneered her own vision for visual storytelling. Her signature approach to masterful commissioning was rooted in unexpected cross-assignment, blurring boundaries between genres and creating space for photography to be interpretive and elaborate - a powerful voice unto itself. Kathy is an icon. She has truly had more impact than any other magazine director of photography in our time. Within photography circles, she is a genuine legend.Now, as she enters a new era of her career as an artist, curator and educator, I wanted to talk to Kathy about her new chapter and what it means to shift from the role of directing images to making them herself. I also wanted to speak to her, now she is untethered from an insitution, about her take on the future of storytelling and the role of the photographer in preserving history, challenging misinformation, and safeguarding the integrity of our shared narratives.Follow Kathy & Gem on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com Thank you to the whole team at ICP for collaborating on this project.

Welcome back. To celebrate reaching the 100th episode of the podcast, I collaborated with the team at the International Centre of Photography in New York City, to host a one day salon. My motivation was to gather the community together in person and start talking about where we stand in photography. Titled, Between Two Worlds, the salon was an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how.Before you dive in, I wanted to share what I told the audience at the salon - there are no tidy or easy answers here. In fact my expectation is that these conversations will involve a lot of complexity and contradiction, but holding space for, and embracing this chaos, is in my opinion, the urgent work that needs to be done. In this session On Documentary, I was joined by Stacy Kranitz, Abdul Kircher, and Sinna Nasseri.Amongst the doom and upheaval that defines life in the 2020s, from political extremism and war, the dizzying technological domination and the profound shifts in perception and attention, the role of documentary photography has never felt so consequential. Amongst this chaos, the protocols of the genre are shifting and new questions are emerging: What happens to documentary photography if we no longer trust in images? How is the changing media landscape impacting how images function? And can new forms of the medium emerge that adequately express the strange, unmapable shape of our present?Projects mentioned:Stacy Kranitz - The year after a denied Abortion and the conversation about the projectAbdul Kircher - Rotting From WithinSinna Nasseri - LA Fires Follow Stacy, Abdul, Sinna & Gem on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com Thank you to the whole team at ICP for collaborating on this project.