The Thinking Photographer's Podcast

It’s funny, isn’t it, how there is a world of difference being in a rut and being in the groove? In one, your life is going nowhere. In the other you’ve struck some sort of creative vein, and mining it is pure joy. Well, normally. But in the case of my project, Dispatches from the Collapse, the ideas and images that came together in 2019, were anything but joyful. I found myself as midwife to a pretty ugly litter. What’s worse, though, is that I’ve revisited and re-tested the assumptions I made when I delivered them and, each one seem, well, depressingly hale and hearty. Here’s the project’s description:“When I made the images in this series, hope was far from my mind. Rather, I imagined the pictures as relics found in a drawer in an abandoned house, decades from now. The imagery and messages attached to them are from an earlier period, just as an unspecified collapse was getting under way. The words are rueful, sometimes even bitter, often with an unspoken “I told you so”. In them I draw attention to a wide range of post- collapse scenarios with a view, in part, to highlight our current naivety and abject lack of preparedness for what is to come.”Don’ let that put you off listening, please! You can always challenge my ideas… Dispatches from the Collapse Niall Benvie The images from Dispatches from the CollapseThe spread of misinformation on social mediaRisks of hyper-connectivityReasons for rising sea levelsGrowth in size of carsDecline of flying insects in GermanyPaul Kingsnorth Life versus the MachineDerrick Jensen on psychopathyGreta Thunberg activismPopulist isolationismEnvironmentally-induced migrationDerrick Jensen and hope

Over the last 30 years or so, I’ve visited and revisited an idea I stumbled upon at the very start of my career. You might even call it an insight - it certainly helped me to understand what I was doing. It’s an idea I’ve revisited, many times over the years to see if it still holds water. And you know what? I think it does! I’m talking about the concept of edges and how we, as people, as well as photographers, naturally gravitate towards them. Those can be edges in space - where the land meets the see and the sky meets the land, for example; in time - the transitions between the season or dawn and dusk; or in being -  very old and very young subjects. In respect of expressive pictures, at least. Perhaps because the idea has stood the test of time remarkably might just mean that there’s something fundamental in our creative work that the concept of edges helps up to understand.As always, I’d love it if you’d share your ideas on this topic, on the Show webpage. Oh and, please, help us along the way , would you, with a review and a rating, ideally a 5 star one. It all helps other folks to discover our place down by the stream. Images from the edge Niall Benvie Jim Brandenburg’s Buster on the ice flowPeter Matthiesen’s The Snow LeopardOn losing our connection with naturePhotographer Patrik LarssonPhotographer Eliot PorterAn explanation of abstract art

You’ve got to be a little careful online these days when you bandy-about words like "addiction". So let me assure you, and those all, ever-vigilant AI bots on the trail of miscreants, that the only drugs I’m talking about here are hormones our own bodies produce. And when it comes to the consequence of the addiction to them, well, I think you’ll find that they are a big factor in driving personal growth. And where’s the harm in that?

Niall unpicks the complex issue of why green communications often fail, what to do about it and the role we photographers can play as part of a team.

Niall asks why there is a fascination with lifeless planets while life on Earth is so gravely imperiled - and gains an insight into miracles in the process.

You can probably think of many, but this week, Niall describes what he sees at the two fundamentally different types of photograph that arise from a desire either to tell a story or, simply, to describe the appearance of things. It pays to know which you’re making before you release the shutter.

As AI technology seeps into more and more corners of our lives, Niall makes the case for nature photography to remain real - and describes hurdles AI just can’t cross.