A Photographic Life - 207: Plus Ian Brown

In episode 207 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on keeping it simple, ignorant criticism, lack of empathy, and not placing your agendas on others. Plus this week photographer Ian Brown takes 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?’ Ian Brown is an award winning photographer whose work focuses on the human condition. Brown grew up dividing his time between the urban landscape and time in the highlands of Northern Ontario. He survived cancer at the age of 19, a heart attack at age 32 and being shot at in the middle of a civil war in Colombia while on assignment for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) documenting conditions in the remote Darrien jungle region a body of work that later went on to become the international exhibition Lost between River and Sky. His work includes projects documenting HIV survivors in Malawi, Africa; a continuing documentary series on the Opioid epidemic and a long term study on the urban anthropology of Detroit. This project, Prairie and Pavement was one of the featured exhibitions at the 2014 Scotiabank Photography Festival in Toronto. For his major portrait body of work American Dreams Brown traveled over 80,000 miles and to all fifty states over the course of twelve years photographing people and asking them to write down in their own handwriting their ideas on America and the concept of the 'American Dream'. This work was published in September 2020. Brown's work has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post and various international publications and he divides his time between Toronto and a cabin outside the Algonquin Park in Canada. www.ianbrownphotography.com Dr. 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 Scott 2022