Gem Fletcher celebrates 100 episodes of The Messy Truth podcast with ten of the most memorable conversations

I started recording The Messy Truth podcast back in 2018, in a tiny recording studio in Hackney Central. My mission: to share the conversations happening over coffee or whispered in the corners of private views with the broader community. I wanted the episodes – candid conversations with artists, editors, curators and thinkers – to serve as a companion for busy creatives, a cheat code for emerging talent, and a way to play a small role in dismantling gatekeeping in an industry where it’s prevalent.

Like any great podcast, the guests are the beating heart of this project. Who I talk to, both individually and collectively, sets the tone for the listener and conjures a reflection on where we stand in the industry at any given moment. I was never interested in chasing trends or big names; I wanted to nerd out with the outsiders, the rebels, the rulebreakers and the newbies. I wanted to talk to the people who go unrecognised, despite quietly doing the work for years, and the people who were willing to discuss the important issues, ranging from mental health, gatekeeping and the problems with awards, to how they manage their finances and how success has impacted their work. While I still have a three-page wish list of guests I am yet to speak to, the multiplicity of perspectives in the last ten seasons starts to illuminate the ideas and issues that have shaped the photographic medium over the last seven years.

What do we want photography to do? Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanise us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us? All of them? None of them? I don’t think we know right now. Most importantly, is it possible for new approaches to the medium to emerge that adequately express or make sense of the strange, unmapable shape of our present?

Below are ten of Gem’s favourite episodes which attempt to explore these questions:

Feedback and critique remain contentious in the creative industry, particularly in photography. From the outset, I knew this was a key topic to explore from various perspectives. Jack Davison and Agnes Lloyd Platt are successful photographers in their own right, but they are also married. Their creative lives are deeply entwined, often acting as each other’s support system and sounding board. Together, they discuss how giving each other crits has always been part of their relationship, despite one of them finding it more challenging than the other. What I love about this episode is the way they unravel how each other’s input has shaped their practice, while addressing the range of emotions – from discomfort to revelation – that are born from it.

Recently, amid the challenges we face in the world, I felt an urgent need to speak to those who have worked in fraught times throughout history, to learn from their experiences and inform how we can navigate the challenging times ahead. Donna Ferrato is a fearless and radical photojournalist, and her seminal book Living With the Enemy sparked a global reckoning, exposing the hidden realities of domestic abuse and igniting conversations that continue to drive change today. Perserverance, trust and a relentless commitment to the work are illuminated throughout the conversation as she reminds us just how powerful a picture can be and why the camera is a tool for justice.

I spoke to Rene Matić during a moment of flux in their practice. They were looking at the world, their work and the relationships they hold close differently. A change of pace, intention and visual language was brewing for the artist, who has literally not stopped making since they picked up a camera seven years ago. For me, this is precisely what the podcast is about – having conversations not just when you are winning but when the path is unclear, when we are not sure what’s next, and the times when things feel out of flow and uncomfortable. It’s fascinating to listen back to Rene’s struggle today, as they are nominated for the Turner Prize and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Go Rene!

What’s more vulnerable than betting on yourself? It takes guts, discovery and a profound belief that things can be different. After years of operating in a traditional photographer and agent dynamic, Cait Opperman founded Flowers, a full-service creative studio born from her desire for greater autonomy and more direct, meaningful collaboration with her clients. While she had a hunch that building Flowers would offer a more expansive way of working with less compromise, Cait also found it rekindled her personal connection to creativity in dynamic and unexpected ways. Reimagining broken systems is crucial to the survival of photography, and this episode provides a valuable blueprint for alternative ways of working.

Vince Aletti has been a leading arbiter of taste in photography for most of his life, first at The Village Voice and then at The New Yorker. We recorded this episode at his East Village apartment, home to an endless treasure trove of photographic material collected over the last fifty years. In our conversation, we discuss obsessions, Queer culture, FOMO, writing, the importance of incongruous connections, Bad Bunny, and the evolving codes of masculinity. This episode is full of optimism, and Vince’s passion for the photographic print is contagious.

Creating a space for intergenerational conversations has always been important to me, especially as longevity in photography is not a given. Together with Liz, we discuss her latest book, I Will Keep You in Good Company, which compiles pages and fragments from over twenty years of her personal workbooks, which she has kept since the early 1990s. These books serve as a kind of private, experimental playground, where she shaped her photographic language through layering, cutting, annotating, and assembling – a space for processing not only images, but life itself. We discuss the importance of finding your tools and process, overcoming shyness and the value of being yourself within the institution.

Over the last 100 episodes, I’ve had numerous conversations with curators, including Roxana Marcoci, Antwan Sargent, Elisa Medde, Alona Pardo, Bindi Vora, and Sophie Hackett, to name a few. A fan favourite is my conversation with curator, writer and consultant Charlotte Cotton, who is photography lore by this point. From her early days shaping London’s photographic scene to her groundbreaking books on fashion, technology and contemporary art, Charlotte is a true pioneer in the industry. In this episode, she shares her thoughts about the future, covering process, ethics, collaboration, audience and much more.

It wouldn’t be a podcast about contemporary photography if we didn’t dig into the highly contentious field of AI once in a while. This episode offers an immersive exploration of uncharted artistic territories and proposes a new paradigm for the future and possibilities of photography, based on Charlie Engman’s two-year exploration with AI.

Listeners know I am obsessed with photography, but few people have captivated me in the last decade in the way that Paul Kooiker has. His unique way of seeing and feeling his way through the world has cultivated a mercurial practice that is difficult to categorise. Often shooting with the iPhone, he has a unique ability to upend conventions and expectations, creating this chaotic dissonance that is both beautiful and provocative.

Change doesn’t come from one person; it comes from collective action and care. This ethos is at the heart of Sheida Soleimani’s practice. Rooted in building relationships, sustaining resistance, and expanding the idea of what protest can be, Sheida is a visionary American-Iranian artist interrogating the role of images in our lives and psyches, as well as the way they manifest as propaganda in geopolitics. During our conversation, we discuss dismissing the notion of singular truth and instead holding space for how trauma and the passage of time allow for new modes of [mis]interpretation.

To celebrate the 100th episode of the podcast, I curated a salon in collaboration with The International Centre of Photography in New York City. Titled Between Two Worlds, the episode is an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. The former is organised by truth, fact, and information; a society built upon the premise that image equals evidence. The new image world can conjure realness untethered from reality, a place where a compelling image matters more than any indexical truth and where images have the potential to usher in new realities. We can sense that this new image world operates differently from the one we were socialised in – and yet it’s unclear exactly how.

You can listen to episode 100 of The Messy Truth here.