A Photographic Life - 185: Plus Richard Ansett

In episode 185 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on keeping things simple, the return of humanist photography and listening to photographers speaking. Plus this week photographer Richard Ansett on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Richard Ansett is a social documentary portrait photographer based in London whose heavily stylised individual studies and essays revolve around an empathy with disenfranchised communities informed by his own relationship to his sexuality and adoption from birth. His individual portraits have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Smithsonian, USA and the Canadian Library and Archive and his portrait of the artist Grayson Perry Mother & Child won first prize at the Sony World Photography Awards 2019. Ansett’s series of portraits exploring the complex mental health of women prisoners and a series exploring a disappearing community in South London, Behind The Brutal Facade, 2020 were both shortlisted subsequently for the same awards. The portrait of an autistic boy in a flower garden from the series Boys in a City Park, Ukraine, 2011 won the Arte Laguna Prize 2013 and his project Mother and Child, Donbas, Ukraine 2011 was exhibited at the UNICEF What is Your Name? exhibition in Kiev in 2016 as a metaphor for the trauma of enforced internal dislocation and migration due to conflict. His portrait Danel, 9from his seriesChildren of Grenfell taken six months after the Grenfell Tower fire was selected as the People’s Choice at the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2018. His images have been selected 13 times for the National Portrait Gallery, London portrait prize exhibition. http://richardansett.com Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). Grant’s book What Does Photography Mean to You? including 89 photographers who have contributed to the A Photographic Life podcast is on sale now £9.99 https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/what-does-photography-mean-to-you/ © Grant Scott 2021