The MOOD Podcast

Odette England  makes her photographs and then damages them, and this conversation is about why that is the most honest thing she has ever done with her voice.
Odette is an Australian artist, writer and photography professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, whose latest book Isn't X Beautiful is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory and the limits of what a photograph can hold.
We talk about growing up on a 200 acre dairy farm in rural South Australia where her father made Polaroid portraits of newborn calves for their birth certificates and her mother typed captions into family albums, and how those 2 modes of picture keeping shaped everything she has made since. We go into her definition of beauty, which is broken, rusty and forlorn rather than pretty, the year she asked her elderly parents to walk their lost farm with her negatives strapped to the soles of their shoes, why she believes photography is drenched in want, and what writing gives her that photography cannot.
Odette talks openly about doubt, about being the least confident person in her own practice, about the drawers of failed work she now calls her box of potentials, and about the daily sentence habit that turned into something she never intended. We finish inside the critique room, on the questions she asks photographers who bring her work they cannot yet explain.
Other things we discussed:
Being refused entry to her school darkroom because she was a girl
Being the only woman in her class
Why the letter X sits at the centre of her book, and why the title ends in an exclamation mark
The 170 English words for the act of seeing
The folly of memory, wrong captions, and choosing to remember the fiction
Her image-based retelling of Susan Sontag's On Photography
Why she thinks moving forward is not always the right next step
What she sees in students of every age that worries her most
Find Odette on her website and Instagram:
https://www.odetteengland.com
https://www.instagram.com/odetteengland
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Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

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In this Moments of Mood episode I sit with a single photograph from my own archive, one I made by accident in under ten seconds, and use it to unpack an idea Cristina Mittermeier gave me: that the photographer is not a messenger but a membrane, a semi-permeable skin whose job is to let a conversation pass between the subject and the stranger who will one day stand in front of the print. I look at why the pressure to have a signature style is muting your photography, why your creative voice is not a possession you transmit but the shape of what you let through, and how ego, not lack of talent, is what fragments an emerging photographer's work.
There's a version of your portfolio where every frame is competent, consistent, technically strong, and somehow says nothing, and if you already know which images I mean, this episode is about why that happens and what your voice actually is instead.
I also get into the book launch that turned Cristina from marine biologist into one of the most seen photographers alive, why technically flawless photographs can be strangely silent, the unnamed photographer whose prints sell the man rather than the animal, the division of labor between vanishing inside the frame and showing up loudly outside it, why a style can be copied by a preset pack while permeability cannot, and a one-frame practice to try this week.
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Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!
Support the show
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

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Trent Davis Bailey spent 7 years photographing a remote farming valley in Colorado, convinced he was making documentary work. He wasn't. The pictures knew before he did: he was searching for the family he'd lost to a twenty-year estrangement, and by the end of The North Fork he had found his aunt, his cousins, and the woman who became his wife. Then he turned the camera toward something far harder. His new photobook Son Pictures, published by Chose Commune, reckons with the crash of United Flight 232, the disaster that killed his mother when he was 3 years old, through his own photographs, family snapshots, newspaper archives, and the eerily premonitory artworks his mother made as a girl, including a drawing of a plane falling from the sky, made decades before she boarded one.
This is a conversation for any photographer who has ever suspected their work is about something they haven't admitted yet. We follow how a photography project becomes a mirror, how a photobook gets edited and sequenced when your heart is too close to the pictures, and how grief, memory and image-making feed each other over a decade of work.
Other things we discussed:
Being tied to a tree for his first ever photographs, and why he's glad the negatives were destroyed
The camera as a passport for a shy kid, and photography as a search for belonging
Why he hides many of his subjects' faces, and the 4-foot constraint that shaped The North Fork
Editing 60 pictures down to 46 with Trespasser, and handing his grief to the right publisher
Rebecca Solnit's essay, walking as a way of seeing, and why "capture" is the wrong word for photography
Watching a Hollywood reenactment of the crash at 7 years old, and how cinema colonises memory
Becoming a father, and the New York Times op-ed that revealed what Son Pictures was really about
Humor as an antidote to grief, and protecting play inside the heaviest work
Robert Adams, reusing photographs across books, and what follows a decade-long project

Find Trent’s work here:
https://trentdavisbailey.com
https://www.instagram.com/trentdavisbailey/
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Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!
Support the show
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

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In this episode you'll discover why beauty in photography is made by your attention, not found in your subjects, and how reading your own form reveals the photographic voice you've been searching for elsewhere.

In this Moments of Mood, I sit with one idea from my recent conversation with photographer and writer Tim Carpenter: that beauty in a photograph is form, not subject matter. Drawing on Robert Adams' book ‘Beauty in Photography’ and Tim's book ‘To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die’, I unpack what form actually is, why we have a bodily response to it, and how the way you meet the world is pressed invisibly into every frame you make. If you're an emerging photographer struggling to find your voice or make cohesive work, this one reframes where beauty, and your signature, actually live.

Other things we discussed:
Why photographs of beautiful subjects can still feel empty
Tim Carpenter's confession about being subject matter driven early in his career
Robert Adams on form as an answer to the fear that life is chaos
Why the most moving photographs hold together barely, not perfectly
How your body decides the photograph before you do
Mindfulness and attention as trainable photographic skills
A practical assignment for photographing the most ordinary place in your life
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Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!
Support the show
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

Join The Community
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders

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Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com

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If you have ever felt technically capable but creatively lost, this conversation shows you how one photographer turned a decade of pictures, and the hardest years of his life, into a body of work that is unmistakably his own.
In this episode I sit down with Rory King, an Australian photographer who works in black and white, prints by hand in the darkroom, and turned 10 years of images into his photobook 'Gumsucker', published by Charcoal Press after he won the 2023 Charcoal Publishing Prize at the Chico Review. We talk about how photography found him, the darkroom as an emotional practice, his mental health struggles that nearly ended his life, and what it actually takes to find your own photographic voice.
Other things we discussed:
Why he refuses to scan film and prints everything by hand
Photographing the same friends for over 10 years
Handing close to 2,000 scans to his publisher and not seeing Gumsucker until years later
The bushrangers and Ned Kelly project he first presented at Chico
Whether the photography and publishing world is elitist and gatekept
How to share your work and find community
The role of family, friends, and sad music in his recovery
Momentum, and why taking the picture matters more than the picture itself

Rory's links:
www.roryking.net
www.instagram.com/kingroary
_____________________________________
Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!
Support the show
Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more.

Join The Community
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders

My Newsletter
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Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com

Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay