~ Talking Pictures ~

Dona Schwartz On the Nest

Dona Schwartz is a photographer and visual ethnographer. Her photographs of expectant parents and empty nesters mark those moments when each couple stands outside the gates of family life. Like Flemish paintings of the seventeenth century, they are portraits that reflect their subject in the symbolic resonance of acquisitions: toys, posters, furnishings, books, musical instruments and sports gear, accreted and layered; the sedimentation of childhood. But the subjects of these portraits are not there. The parents-to-be and the empty nesters attest to that absence. This is not their space. It was once. Perhaps it will be again. But for now they remain familiar strangers in a place elsewhere but the present.

Dona Schwartz discusses the two poles of parenthood at TALKING PICTURES ONLINE.

Jose Quintanilla What Remains…

Jose Quintanilla’s photographic landscapes trace the afterlife of place. Within them, past and present coexist in a kind of meditative tension, though its emphasis shifts from one series to another. At times it emerges through neglect or simple forgetfulness as societies strain toward the future, leaving abandoned architectural spaces to nature’s reclamation. Elsewhere the landscape itself bears the scars of environmental degradation.

In this interview the artist traces the development of his work across an unfolding dialogue between rebirth and what remains. In doing so, he reveals how cultural aspirations persist within the landscape long after the social worlds that produced them have faded.

Jose Quintanilla discusses the interplay of nature and culture at TALKING PICTURES ONLINE. https://talking-pictures.online/2026/06/17/jose-quintanilla-what-remains/

For readers in Spain, Jose Quintanilla’s exhibition ‘Giverny 2.0’ is currently showing at DDR Art Gallery in Madrid as part of PHotoESPAÑA (through to 31 July).

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Oleg Videnin Photographs from My Heart

The gently observed portraits of the Russian photographer Oleg Videnin capture everyday people going about their everyday business in the modest regional city of Bryansk, and finds within each the mysterious magic of the ordinary. These are not images that clamour for our attention, their subjects remain quietly assured of who they are… It is they who regard us from their world of shaded greys in a private conversation of the eyes. These are photographs haunted by a paradoxical sense of intimacy and restraint, of recognition in the midst of that which is ultimately unknowable.

Oleg Videnin discusses the mysterious beauty he finds in his hometown of Bryansk at Talking Pictures.

Wilfred Lim Happy on the Outside

Wilfred Lim grew up in the Malaysian fishing village of Pengerang and now lives in the hyperreal metropolis of Singapore. Two different worlds, with different speeds, different values, yet Pengerang is just a few short kilometres across the Johore Strait from Changi Airport. With such proximity, it is perhaps inevitable that the village and its environs should fall prey to industrial development, in this case a massive oil refinery built on land scraped clean of its past and its people.

Through his photo-performances, Wilfred Lim attests to the destruction of his community, its history and its culture, mourning the loss of its collective soul. Later, in works made during the Covid-19 lockdown, he contrasts his own sense of impotent frustration with the remarkable re-naturing of Singapore as flowers bloom and insects and birds return to streets devoid of people.

Wilfred Lim discusses the ideas that underpin his performative photographs at Talking Pictures.

Rebecca Sexton Larson Memory Making

Rebecca Sexton Larson is a visual storyteller, but her narratives are not singular or fixed. Instead, they echo the fluid, reconstructive nature of memory in ways that seek to preserve the emotional complexity of family relationships. Beginning with photographs drawn from archives and family albums, she creates collages that she then layers with paint, text, and embroidery. The work develops through acts of selection and rearrangement, layering and stitching. It is a practice guided as much by the intelligence of the hand and eye as by any predetermined outcome – an approach in which making itself becomes a form of thinking.

Rebecca Sexton Larson weaves her stories from the family album at Talking Pictures.

Fernando Montiel Klint Seeking the Eternal

The images of the Mexican photographer Fernando Montiel Klint portray individuals engaged in obscure rituals. For those involved, locked within their interior world, there appears to be a clear sense of purpose. But for the viewer that purpose remains mysteriously paradoxical. A paradox is a story that demands that we work to complete it. It is a form of meditation free of religious dogma or psychoanalytical judgement that can bring its own insights, finding its essence in something deep that we all share: the human imagination.

Fernando Montiel Klint discusses his work with Alasdair Foster at TALKING PICTURES ONLINE.

Diana Blok The Beautiful Imperfect

It was against the shifting social context of the 1970s and 1980s that the work of the artist Diana Blok first came to public attention. Her nudes, initially of herself and later of family, friends and acquaintances, were marked by their simplicity and the naturalness of the bodies they revealed. While they explored relationships – of parent, child, sibling, lover – they avoided the stereotypes of gender and sexuality, maintaining an authenticity and autonomy that elevated them from the dominant aesthetics of the time by virtue of the very ordinariness of those they depicted – the reality of imperfection that makes us each unique.

In her interview with Talking Pictures, Diana Blok discusses this early work and its ongoing evolution through to the 2020s.

Gjert Rognli Modern Myths and Ancient Wisdom

The Norwegian artist Gjert Rognli has established an international reputation as a photographer and filmmaker. Identifying as Sámi, Kven, and queer, he grew up within what he describes as a triple minority background – one shaped by overlapping histories of cultural suppression, religious conversion, and contested identity. Drawing on these intersecting perspectives, his photographs evoke a liminal space between contemporary art and inherited knowledge. Through themes of environment, memory, and transformation, his work reflects on human interconnectedness with the natural world, and on the enduring cycles of life and death that bind them.

Gjert Rognli weaves ancient culture with contemporary ecology at Talking Pictures.

Ilan Wittenberg Real Men

When we speak of ‘real men’ we often mean the opposite: individuals who appear to live up to the impossibly idealised aspirations of symbolic masculine perfection. But Ilan Wittenberg’s photographs truly do present real men. His extensive photographic catalogue captures the complexity of uniqueness and imperfection, frailty and forbearance, anxiety and the courage to overcome it. These men are flesh and blood, diverse, and susceptible to the inevitabilities of illness and aging. As the title of the series declares, this is literally and figuratively the ‘Bare Truth’.

Ilan Wittenberg discusses the concept and creation of this series at Talking Pictures.

Danielle Van Zadelhoff Of Time and Authenticity

Through the subtle use of lighting and pose the Belgian photo-artist Danielle van Zadelhoff recreates the feeling of paintings from the Golden Age, a time when art was breaking free of religion to explore the allegorical possibilities of domestic life and portraiture. She does not restage specific paintings as photographic tableaux but draws on a shared cultural memory of this important period in the western history of art. Like the poetry and literature of the past, we recognise the visual language of another era and associate it with the deeper meanings that those poems, stories, and pictures sought to engage. – What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be mortal? What is it to love, to suffer, to despair? – In setting her portraits within the visual language of the past, Danielle van Zadelhoff invites us to look beyond the simple fact of photographic representation to the more profound questions that have engaged and perplexed the minds of human beings for centuries.

Danielle van Zadelhoff discusses the ideas that underpin her images at Talking Pictures.

Edgar Alvarez Imaginary Worlds and Sad Realities

When the Colombian photographer Edgar Alvarez moved to Los Angeles he saw what many failed to notice: homeless men and women were everywhere on the streets. But in the City of Angels everyone drives car, they move at a different speed, in a different world from those less fortunate. Edgar is not, of course, the first photographer to notice the homeless or to decide to make work about their plight. But photographing homeless men and women can quickly become a cliché and, at worst, a form of voyeuristic schadenfreude. His approach was different. Using his skills as a claymation animator, he created plasticine figures based on the individual street people he came to know and develop friendships with. Photographing (and filming) these clay figures in real locations, carefully framed to harmonise scale, he found a way to overcome the challenge of creating images of homelessness. His work touches the viewer while avoiding the pitfall of representing individual human beings as abject spectacle.

Edgar Alvarez explains his way of using plasticine as the means to a different form of social documentary at Talking Pictures.

Liliana Molero A Subtlety of the Sublime

The photographs of the Uruguayan artist Liliana Molero reflect upon the primal connection we have to the land. Its enormity, its incredible beauty, its perils. These are landscapes that touch on the sublime, a quality that stretches beyond the aesthetic to the very borders of the metaphysical. And, for the artist, these landscapes reach both into her psychological interior and out into a space so vast, so complex, that it renders the human merely transient. Her images speak with nuance and restraint about political disenchantment and existential threat in ways that nonetheless remain intimate. A reminder that the transcendence of the sublime is not only found in evocations of imposing mountains and violent storms, but also in opening oneself to the enigmatic mystery of space itself.

Liliana Molero speaks about the power of subtlety at Talking Pictures.

Sam Harris Postcards from Home

It is the mark of a true artist to take the ordinary and discover within it something extraordinary. Sam Harris’ photographs of his family on their property in rural Western Australia achieve a delicate fusion of the idiosyncratic and the universal. They whisper of deep truths that nestle at the heart of each of us. He does so with the lightest of touches, often directing our gaze away from the apparent centre of attention to a fleeting interplay on the outskirts of perception. While all the images are made from one perspective – a father – they juxtapose many points of view. For each of us must take on multiple modalities of being: partner, parent, offspring, sibling, lover, worker, fixer, driver, guardian, nurse, clown, psychologist, confessor…

In this Talking Pictures interview, Sam Harris explains why he left a successful photography career in the British music industry to discover new and more meaningful inspiration at home in regional Australia.

The Jackson Twins Seeing Double

The British artists Karl and Ian Jackson are identical twins. They collaborate to create photographic tableaux in which they are also the performers, exploring the myths and parapsychology associated with twinnedness. Their images draw on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance, and Hollywood cinema, always laced with a dash of distinctly British whimsy. But, beneath the comedy and the melodrama, darker and more profound issues await those willing to contemplate the histories on which these visual narratives are built. This shadowy, subterranean psychology is a quality that gives their work its depth and complexity.

Karl and Ian Jackson reflect upon the close life-long bond at the heart of their creative partnership at Talking Pictures.

Deborah Luster Evidence of Life

Deborah Luster began making photographs following the murder of her mother. Remarkably, the works for which she has become best known are deeply humane portraits of the inmates of three prisons in the northeast of Louisiana, among them those serving life sentences.

The USA incarcerates more of its own population than any other country in the world and, within that country, the state of Louisiana imprisons the most. Across the country, the proportion of the black African American community in prison is five times that of the white Caucasian. Ethnicity and poverty skew the way in which offenders are sentenced and, as a consequence, the demographics of the American penal system.

It is against this background that Deborah Luster began her work collaborating with inmates to create nuanced, timeless portraits that seek to discover the human condition behind the label ‘prisoner’: to provide a mirror to the individual, and a means of connection with their families beyond the prison walls.

Deborah Luster discusses the stories behind these portraits at Talking Pictures.

Han Sungpil Travels in Hyperreality

For the Korean artist, Han Sungpil, the contemporary city has become a liminal space at the threshold of real and fake. His images of shrouded buildings and trompe l’oeil paintings, and his documentation of replica tourist attractions planted incongruously in cultural landscapes with which they share no common history… these are the subject of his images. But the underlying themes run deep, posing more challenging questions about our increasingly hyperreal urban experience. While its manifestations can be entertaining on a superficial level, they mask a darker blurring of the line between evidence and belief.

Han Sungpil reflects on the beguiling spectacle of contemporary hyperreality at Talking Pictures.

Tim Hetherington Of War and Compassion

The work of Tim Hetherington stands in sharp contrast to the photographic conventions of depicting armed conflict. War, as he later observed, is “boredom punctuated by sheer terror”. Rather than seeking to represent warfare through iconic, but essentially cliché images of dramatic action, he began to explore what he called the “texture” of life in the bunker. The resulting work brought a wholly original way of understanding the nature of war for a modern soldier on the front line. In so doing, he began to engage the entanglement of danger, masculinity, and comradery that draws young men to battle. It was the work that came to define his oeuvre, challenging and empathic in equal parts.

Tim Hetherington was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan civil war. In this interview, four friends and former colleagues remember the man, his work, and his ever-evolving approach to storytelling. Their conversation is at Talking Pictures.