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, Gem Fletcher is joined by Bruno Ceschel, Brian Paul Lamotte and Lillian Wilkie. Together they discuss, What’s next for PhotoBook publishing?

PhotoBook publishing has grown exponentially over the last decade, contributing to the evolving narrative of photography. At this moment of seeming abundance, it feels important to consider the economic, environmental, political and cultural realities moving forward for publishers and artists. What values are shaping the wider culture of PhotoBook publishing? How is the current market evolving? Is it possible to create new forms of the medium that adequately express the strange, unmapable shape of our present?

Bruno Ceschel
Bruno Ceschel is the founder and director of Self Publish, Be Happy (SPBH), an organization dedicated to visual culture, education, and community. Since 2010, SPBH has organized events at institutions such as Tate Modern, MoMA PS1, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Its collection of over 3,000 artists’ books is housed at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. As Publishing Director at SPBH Editions, Ceschel has published works by authors including Vince Aletti, Carmen Winant, Charlie Engman, and Mari Katayama. He is a visiting lecturer at École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) and Cornell University.

Brian Paul Lamotte
Brian Paul Lamotte is an independent graphic designer and educator based between Milan and Zürich, specializing in art and photography publishing. Trained in graphic design at Central Saint Martins, his practice is grounded in close collaboration with artists, editors, and printers and is characterized by a research-driven approach to image-led solutions, minimal typography, and material sensitivity in the production of the book form. He has designed and produced books and various printed projects for select publishers and cultural institutions, including Aperture Foundation, Dashwood Books, Edition Patrick Frey, Fondation Louis Vuitton, MACK, MAST Foundation, MoMA, Rizzoli and SPBH Editions, where he is currently the art director.

Lillian Wilkie
Lillian Wilkie is a writer, editor and publisher based in London and East Sussex. Her practice and research focus on artist publishing and its communities, photography and its contexts, and marginal fashion media. She is the Director of Chateau International, an independent imprint producing books, zines, editions and programming. Whilst prioritising female and non-binary artists and writers, Chateau International works with a range of international collaborators who share its interests in the counterculture, fashion, feminism, radical politics, community organising and practices of photography. Lillian is co-Director of Bound Art Book Fair at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, a key annual event that builds and sustains communities around print publishing practices whilst exploring the potential for expanded forms of publishing that engage or interact with performance, music, sculpture, fashion, moving image and activism. In 2024, she co-organised INVENTORY, a major publishing programme at Cromwell Place, London.

Follow Brian, Bruno, Lillian & 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Man

Follow 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

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