The Eyeshot Podcast on Street & Documentary Photography

David Alan Harvey on street photography made inside other people's homes, on sixty years of keeping his own box of work going in parallel, and on the rejection that started everything. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the American photographer, who has made more than forty essays for National Geographic and founded Burn Magazine, explains why he stopped photographing what things look like.David Alan Harvey has photographed for National Geographic since 1973, was a member of Magnum Photos from 1997 until 2021, and founded Burn Magazine in 2008. In this conversation he talks about the way he actually works, which is to get inside a house rather than wait on the corner, and about what it took for one family in Norfolk, Virginia, to let him sleep on their sofa and make his first book. He talks about growing up in a Virginia town with nothing spectacular to photograph, about three months in isolation at six years old, about the colour he learned from Goya, and about one camera and one lens as a form of honesty. He explains why he never told an editor to look at his photographs, why he knocked on Carlos Fuentes' door before finishing Divided Soul, and how a conversation he was only being polite about turned into Burn Magazine. Sixty years in, he says the luck was never the assignments. It was keeping the enthusiasm.Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kwVdZ40gN6QPhotographs © David Alan Harvey. Interview © Eyeshot.

Gary Knight on war, evidence, and the limits of what a photographer can know. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the British photojournalist, co-founder of VII Photo Agency and Executive Director of The VII Foundation, explains why nobody wins a war, why he no longer needs to be the one telling other people's stories, and why he believes photojournalism has to be liberated from the press.Four decades inside conflict, from Cambodia to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is harder on his own work than on anyone else's: he calls what he made in Bosnia superficial, and says that four decades in, he trusts his own certainty less than he did at the start. He talks about the ethics of proximity and the gift handed to you by the people who let you in, about founding VII on a shoestring in September 2001, about The Stringer and what happens when journalists face the questions they spend their lives asking everybody else, and about the grieving mother photograph we have all seen too many times.Gary Knight co-founded VII Photo Agency on 9 September 2001. He is Executive Director and co-founder of The VII Foundation, which runs the VII Academy and its education programmes for photographers from the majority world.Interview © Eyeshot. Gary Knight appears courtesy of The VII Foundation.Watch the full video interview on YouTube.https://youtu.be/bbTeIWcX5ZQ

Max Sturgeon on street photography, flash, and the emotion that layering leaves out. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the American photographer explains why he lowers the camera and waits for people to look at him before he releases the shutter.In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Max Sturgeon, American photographer and winner of the Eyeshot Open Call in the series category, describes a practice built entirely outside the conventional route. Photography reached him through two other passions, cinema and travel, and after twenty years working on film sets he moved what was left of that creative energy into the street. He does not shoot at home, because nothing there surprises him any more, and he defends the position of the outsider without dismissing the argument for the local photographer. He breaks one of the most repeated rules of the genre on purpose: he frames through the viewfinder, lowers the camera, and waits for eye contact before he takes the picture. He calls street photography soulless when it stacks people and layers with no emotion underneath. He talks about the flash he swore he would never use, and about the trap it sets for the photographers who do. He admits, without softening it, that he shoots pictures he knows will do well online. And he explains how Of a Different Stripe was already edited before he ever submitted it, how a workshop on sequencing changed the way he builds a body of work, and why anyone entering an open call should send a series. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.His book Of a Different Stripe was published by Eyeshot in 2021, hardcover, 160 pages, with a foreword by Vineet Vohra. The limited edition is sold out.Watch the full video interview on YouTube. https://youtu.be/tz2epbYN7AY

Lorenzo Catena designed buildings before he photographed people. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the Roman street photographer, co-author with Valeria Tofanelli of the sold out Eyeshot book Mareterno, explains what happened the day he watched another photographer reinterpret his own architecture, and everything that followed. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Lorenzo Catena talks about reading the street in thresholds and layers, choosing between color and black and white at gut level, making flash pass for natural light, the year and a half spent photographing the sea of Rome for Mareterno, why the rules of street photography are not a checklist, what the reel culture is doing to photographers, and why the future of street photography is the authenticity of the moment.Watch the full video interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8BasAeD5evc

Bill Shapiro spent years deciding which photographs a country would look at. In this second Eyeshot 50mm conversation he moves to the other side of the submission and says plainly what a juror sees, what an editor does, and what has kept photographers working for decades. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Bill Shapiro, former Editor-in-Chief of LIFE, founding editor of LIFE.com and co-founder of BluePhoto Collective, returns as a juror of the Eyeshot Open Call 2026. He dismantles the belief that jurors reward work resembling their own, describes the picture that made him choose against his own taste, and explains why a photograph that needs four paragraphs of explanation is not communicating well enough. He talks about the editor as a stand-in for the viewer, editing as a genuinely artistic act, and the danger of a style that hardens into a gimmick. He argues that gatekeeper is not a dirty word, describes the small daily act he uses to force his own algorithm open, and names what has mattered more than talent in every long career he has watched. He closes with the photographs of a village in northern New Mexico that sat in a basement for fifty years before anyone saw them. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.