A Photographic Life - 95: Plus Anton Kusters

In episode 95 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed, feeling political and strident, suggesting that the photographic establishment need to start talking 'with' not 'at' photographers, reflecting on issues of photographic self-doubt and calling for a punk informed attitude amongst the photo community to creating new initiatives!  Plus this week photographer Anton Kusters 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?’ Anton Kusters was born in Belgium in 1974, and obtained a master's degree in Political Science at K.U.Leuven, Belgium. He studied photography at STUK Leuven and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hasselt, Belgium. Kusters has photographed, published and exhibited two major bodies of work, the Yakuza in 2011 and Mono No Aware in 2014. In 2017 he completed the online epistolary #image_by_image, an experimental public dialogue based on associations of image and word, fragment and concept, re-contextualisation and reflection. In 2019 year he was nominated for the Prix Pictet, and he is a finalist in the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for his exhibition The Blue Skies Project in the Fitzrovia Chapel, London, curated and produced by longstanding collaborator Monica Allende. An installation of The Blue Skies Project will be exhibited in 2019-2021 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and in 2020 a monograph on the work will be published. He is currently working on several installations and collaborations: Caduta Massi, La C.H., and On Your Shoulders We Stand. Anton was also the co-founder of BURN Magazine, an online platform dedicated to emerging photographers. He currently lives and works in Belgium and Tokyo. https://antonkusters.com If you have enjoyed this podcast why not check out our A Photographic Life Podcast Plus. Created as a learning resource that places the power of learning into the hands of the learner. To suggest where you can go, what you can read, who you can discover and what you can question to further your own knowledge, experience and enjoyment of photography. It will be inspiring, informative and enjoyable! You can find out here: www.patreon.com/aphotographiclifepodcast You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast 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 book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. 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. © Grant Scott 2020