Polly Braden: On negotiating consent
In this episode, we talk with Polly Braden about how she negotiates continual consent with people in vulnerable situations. She describes the importance of pursuing depth and nuance in storytelling, and she explains what it means to be a socially conscious photographer. Finally, Polly discusses fair wages in the creative industry and the process of applying for grants.
What you’ll find inside:
“If you want to try and be the person who is going to talk to those things, then you need to understand the depth of it. And so that’s what gets missed doing quick stories for the Guardian over two days, or for another newspaper” (9:40)
“If he comes out of the secure prison, and there’s stories about him all across the Guardian, and then he’s moving into a house in the community, that might not be the best thing for him if we don’t tell the story right. So we really, really had to think through what is consent in this case.” (16:37)
A discussion of fair wages and applying for grants (27:02)
“My kind of photography is trying to tell stories to raise awareness about things. I would have been shy saying that before, because it sounds really boring and, you know, not very exciting. But the truth of the matter is that’s what I do.” (32:25)
“So you sort of, you have an idea, you reach down, you come back up, tell the stories, then you go out and tell everybody about it. And then, sometimes, little bits of change happen.” (35:08)
What does photo ethics mean to Polly?
“I suppose what it really means is to think through the consequences of every photograph. And what I mean by that is not just the consequences of taking the picture, but the consequences of where you publish the photograph.” (36:24)
Links:
Polly Braden is a documentary photographer whose work features an ongoing conversation between the people she photographs and the environment in which they find themselves. Highlighting the small, often unconscious gestures of her subjects, Polly particularly enjoys long-term, in depth collaborations that, in turn, lends her photographs a unique, quiet intimacy.
Polly has produced a large body of work that includes not only solo exhibitions and magazine features, but also three books. Polly is a previous winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize and The Guardian Young Photographer of the Year.
You can see Polly’s work at www.pollybraden.com