A Photographic Life - 65: Plus Laura El-Tantawy

In episode 65 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the future of photography, technological developments and there involvement in advancing the medium and the importance of judges in deciding the winners of photographic competitions .  Plus this week photographer Laura El-Tantawy takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Laura El-Tantawy is a British/Egyptian documentary photographer, book maker and mentor. Born in Worcestershire, UK, she studied in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the US and in the UK. Laura graduated from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, in 2002 with dual degrees in journalism and political science and began working as a newspaper photographer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. In 2006, she began working as a freelance photographer to enable her to work on personal projects. She completed a research fellowship at the University of Oxford in 2009, and gained an MA in art and media practice from the University of Westminster, London, in 2011. Her work explores notions of home & belonging and has been awarded, exhibited and published internationally, including in The New Yorker, Le Monde, National Geographic, Time, New York Times, and Foam. In 2015 she released her first book In the Shadow of the Pyramids, a first-person account exploring memory and identity that was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize – awarded annually to an artist of any nationality who has made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe. She subsequently self-published The People in 2015, a newsprint publication celebrating the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and Beyond Here Is Nothing in 2017, a meditation on home & belonging. In 2019 she published her fourth monograph, A Star in the Sea, a contemplation on embracing the unexpected. www.lauraeltantawy.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, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n’ Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay can now be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=3915s.