The Messy Truth podcast is a series of candid conversations hosted by Gem Fletcher, that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. Launched in 2019, the podcast is about starting a discourse about the complex reality of image-making in an effort to bring greater transparency to parts of the industry shrouded in mystery and open up a collective space for learning and reimagining the future of visual culture.
At this year's festival, we hosted a series of live conversations for The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 with exhibiting artists and artists exploring the theme Back to the future: taking moments from the past as inspiration to re-stage, re-imagine or re-think existing narratives.
Alexander Coggin
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.
Åsa Johannesson
To celebrate her new book Queer Methodology for Photography, artist and educator Asa Johannesson sits down with Gem Fletcher to discuss new approaches to making, thinking, and writing about queer photography informed by a rich history of Queer image makers. Through the book, Johannesson proposes a new concept of the photographic image that addresses its materiality, in the form of the poetic and the political, in relationship to a generative principle that is named as a queer quality: the photograph’s ability to voice queer concerns beyond its role as representation.
Åsa Johannesson is an artist working across photography, installation, and writing. Her practice concerns the relationship between queerness, representation, and material knowledge production.
BIndi Vora
In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Bindi Vora who utilses collage, mark making and the appropriative use of image and text to question how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. The conversation will focus on two projects Vora is presenting at Peckham 24, Mountain of Salt and Unravelling.
Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of 371 works composed of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, initially conceptualised as a human response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the country was plunged into lockdown, Vora began to collect fragments of text and spoken word from politicians, journalists or members of the public accrued across a range of sources; government briefings, Twitter commentary and even placards from the Black Lives Matter protests. The resulting juxtapositions feel uncanny—familiar yet elusive—like a half-remembered dream.
In an evolving new series Unravelling, Vora attempts to locate herself in a culture where colonial systems have sought to flatten and simplify her heritage. The work gently unravels Vora’s family history of migration traversing three continents, over the course of a century to explore the interplay of archive and myth, unveiling the complexities and tensions inherent in diasporic experiences.
Bindi Vora is an interdisciplinary artist of Kenyan-Indian heritage, associate lecturer at LCC and senior curator at Autograph, London. She is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. Her practice often combines linguistics and an archive of personal and found photographs procured over the last decade to draw on the intersections between language, culture and their inherent power dynamics.
Eleonora agostini
In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Eleonora Agostini about her project A Study on Waitressing. As a child, Eleonora Agostini would sit in her family’s restaurant and observe her mother working front of house. Over lunch, she would study her mother’s movements as she circulated the restaurant, hearing her repeat the same phrases and entertaining the clients. Occasionally, she would witness her mother slip behind the curtain that led to the kitchen to complain about a customer, before smiling and returning to the restaurant floor as if nothing had happened.It is this shifting of personas, the performativity of social roles and its relationship with images that underpins A Study on Waitressing. The work assembles and re-presents photographs, archival imagery and footage, collage and text as a research method to analyse the theatricality of the everyday and the function of the body as a conduit between observer and observed.
LINA Geoushy
In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Lina Geoushy to discuss her work Trailblazers, an inquiry into Egypt’s feminist history using self-portraiture, performance, and archival artefacts to reclaim and inscribe a counter-history. Geoushy, who was born in Cairo in 1990, was deeply influenced by Egyptian cinema made between the 1940s and 1960s, a period known as the Golden Age of cinema in Egypt in which women played powerful roles. These portrayals were in stark contrast to the conservative reality Geoushy witnessed the women around her navigate from the 1990s onwards. Responding to this dissonance, Geoushy has built an archive informed by a feminist impulse, amassing popular cultural material depicting and describing acts of female achievement and struggle.
Lina Geoushy is an Egyptian social documentary photographer living and working between London and Cairo whose work explores gender, female empowerment and sociopolitical issues.