In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Alexander Coggin to discuss ‘Mike,’ a fifteen year photographic archive of his spouse Micheal. United by a spontaneity and informed by Coggin’s background in theatre, Mike is a deeply intimate, yet playful exploration of Queer love told through hundreds of photographs. “I carry an embodied memory with every single one of these images,” explains Coggin. “I can tell you where we were, why, and roughly when. I can tell you how I was feeling at the time of the image-taking. I can tell you what happened before and what happened after. Michael, however, doesn’t remember the making of these images, as he stopped noticing being photographed a long time ago.” Through ‘Mike,’ Coggin offers a cross section of lived history that encompasses the theatricality of the everyday to life's most vulnerable moments. 

Alexander Coggin is an American queer photographer and filmmaker living in London who penetrates trends of visual homogeneity with idiosyncratic and uncanny imagery. Raised in the theatre, he is dedicated to bringing the same theatrical and artificial frameworks learned on the stage to the visible everyday. 

Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.