A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers

Joachim Ladefoged is a Danish photographer born in 1970. He has worked as a professional since 1991, and is a member of the international photo agency VII. Today he is a staff photographer at the Danish Daily Jyllands-Posten, but over the years he has worked regularly for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, Mare, The New Yorker and TIME.
Joachim has received numerous awards for his work from institutions such as Visa D'Or, World Press Photo, POYi, Eissie, and Agfa, as well as Picture of the Year in Denmark. Over the years he has published 3 monographs, Albanians, Mirror and Time After My Time.
Joachim photographs everything with the same inventiveness and diligence, whether sports, war or commerce. His highly accomplished career has seen him master complex, violent news stories, commercial assignments, daily news, and rich, vibrant, and spectacular feature stories. Joachim is credited with being one of the driving forces behind the new wave of Danish photojournalism.
In episode 274, Joachim discusses, among other things:
Having arthritis as a teenager and the impact it had on his life (good and bad)
Starting his career as an intern at a local newspaper
Moving on to ‘the best job in the world’ at national newspaper Politiken
Winning the World Press Photo award
Words of wisdom received from Magnum legend Constantine Manos
Getting into Magnum… and being chucked out again
Being part of ‘the new wave of Danish photojounalists’
Why changing direction on becoming a father was “the right decision, but a hard decision”
Why three photographers were just made redundant on his newspaper
His approach to shooting and lighting portraits
His book project Time After My Time
Photographing his kids with the iPhone
Instagram


Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.
Follow me on Instagram here.
Need a new website? I will build you one with Squarespace. Details here.

Lee Shulman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most significant archives of vernacular color photography in existence. Since 2017, the project has amassed nearly one million Kodachrome slides from the 1940s to the early 2000s — intimate, everyday images that might have otherwise been lost to time. Through curation and transformation, Lee reanimates these personal photographs, weaving them into compelling narratives that explore memory, family, love, and cultural shifts across generations.
Lee’s career also extends into film direction, notably with his debut feature documentary, "I Am Martin Parr," released in 2025. This film chronicles a road trip with renowned photographer Martin Parr, revisiting iconic locations from his oeuvre. Shulman's prior collaboration with Parr on the "Déjà View" project, which paired Parr's distinctive photographs with images from The Anonymous Project, laid the groundwork for their working relationship. The documentary provides an affectionate portrayal of Parr's artistic process and enduring work ethic, further cementing Lee’s engagement with the broader discourse of photography.
Born in London in 1973, Lee lives and works in Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and Rencontres d’Arles, and is held in major collections such as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Photo Elysée in Lausanne.
Website | Instagram


Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.
Follow me on Instagram here.
Need a new website? I will build you one with Squarespace. Details here.

Featuring:
Ed Sykes
Ian Howarth
Dina Litovsky
Joseph Michael Lopez
Mike Abrahams
Ian Macdonald
Katrin Koenning
Tomasz Tomaszewski
Mackenzie Calle
Marc Wilson
Paul Seawright
Mohamed Bourouissa
Anna Arendt
Marjolein Martinot
Rankin
Tony Docekal
Eli Reed
Merlin Daleman
Mike Brodie
Paul Sng
Ed Kashi
Rachel Elizabeth Seed


Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.
Follow me on Instagram here.
Need a new website? I will build you one with Squarespace. Details here.

Rachel Elizabeth Seed is a Brooklyn and Los Angeles-based nonfiction storyteller working in film, photography, and writing.
In 2025, she won the Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award for her debut feature film, A Photographic Memory, which is also a New York Times Critics Pick.
Rachel’s work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Films, the Jewish Film Institute, the California Film Institute, Jewish Story Partners, NYFA, Field of Vision, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, the Maine Media Workshops, the Roy W. Dean grant, the National Arts Club, IFP, and many others. 
Formerly a photo editor at New York Magazine, her photography has been exhibited worldwide, including at the International Center of Photography, and she was a cameraperson on several award-winning feature documentaries. Rachel’s writing has been published by No Film School, the Sundance Institute, and Talkhouse and she is Executive Director / Co-founder of the Brooklyn Documentary Club, a NYC-based filmmaker collective with 250+ members.
In episode 271, Rachel discusses, among other things:
A summary of her mum’s character
nature vs. nurture
Her mum’s Images of Man interviews for ICP/Scholastic
What inspired her to make a film
How her own story became interwined with her mum’s
Discovering a family archive of super 8 footage
How she recreated the interviews using actors
The importance of working with good editors
The challenge of funding and financing
Key advice for anyone wanting to make a personal documentary
The fine balance between collaboration and having the courage of your convitions as director
Writing for narration as opposed to for reading
Sharing her personal stories as the film evolved over a ten year period - How to balance life and art
‘Selling the film’ and what that means in practice
The Brooklyn Documentary Club
Moving to L.A.
Projects she has in development
Website | Instagram


Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.
Follow me on Instagram here.
Need a new website? I will build you one with Squarespace. Details here.

Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952), the man who the Daily Telegraph declared to be, “arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer” is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
His major projects have been rural communities (1975–1982), The Last Resort (1983–1985), The Cost of Living (1987–1989), Small World (1987–1994) and Common Sense (1995–1999). Since 1994, Martin has been a member of Magnum Photos, where he scraped in by one vote and where between 2013 and 2017 he served as President. His work has been published in numerous photobooks, over 120 of his own, and he has exhibited prolifically throughout his career.
In 2017 the Martin Parr Foundation was opened in Bristol. The MPF is as a gallery and archive and research resource dedicated to both preserving the Martin’s photographic legacy and to supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on the British Isles.
Since his first A Small Voice appearance on Episode 91 of the podcast in October 2018, Martin has had a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which opened in March 2019. Entitled Only Human, the show included portraits from around the world, with a special focus on Britishness, explored through a series of projects that investigated British identity. Also since that episode Martin was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in June, 2021.
Martin’s latest book, A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village was released in September 2022 by RRB Books.

On episode 197, Martin discusses, among other things:
Influence of his methodist grandfather… and peers at Manchester
Early experiences in Hebdon Bridge
The move to Ireland - From the Pope to a Flat White
Liverpool and the controversy around The Last Resort work
Bristol and Bath - The Cost of Living
Being blown away by his first experience of Arles
Joining Magnum amidst disapproval from the old guard
Small World
A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village
Signs of the Times
Common Sense
The work of the Martin Parr Foundation
Good work and bad work
Referenced:
Robert Doisneau
Bill Brandt
Robert Frank
Garry Winogrand
Alan Murgatroyd
Brian Griffin
Daniel Meadows
Albert Street Workshop
Fintan O’Toole
Peter Fraser
Peter Mitchell
Tom Wood
Anna Fox
Ken Grant
David Moore
John Hinde
Philip Jones Griffiths
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Boris Mikhailov
Krass Clement
 
Martin: Website | Instagram | Episode 91 | Chew Stoke book
MPF: Website | Instagram
“Most of the pictures I take are very bad, because to get the good pictures is almost impossible. If you went out in the morning and said ‘today I’m only gonna take good pictures’ you wouldn’t get anywhere. You wouldn’t even start. So you’ve got to have that momentum of shooting, and you’ve got to have found the right subject, the right place, the right time, and then things will start to happen.”


Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.
Follow me on Instagram here.
Need a new website? I will build you one with Squarespace. Details here.