The MOOD Podcast

Learn exactly what an SFMOMA photography curator looks for, what she passes over, and how to get your work seen without an MFA, a gallery, or a 6-paragraph artist statement.
I sat down with Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), to find out how photography actually enters a museum collection. Shana has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Center for Creative Photography, holds a PhD in the history of photography, and has spent over 7 years at SFMOMA curating exhibitions, acquiring work, and reviewing portfolios.
We talked about how a curator decides which photographs get remembered, why she needs to be able to write about your work before she can acquire it, the one question every photography project has to answer, and the practical advice she gives emerging photographers trying to get exhibited, published, or noticed.

Other things we discussed:
What a curator actually does day to day, from wall texts to installation choreography
Why she thinks about exhibition layouts musically
Curating photobooks versus curating walls, and why she reads books from the back
Trends in museum photography, and whether documentary is disappearing
How to write an artist statement a jury will actually read
Portfolio reviews: what to bring, what not to say, and when to come back
Why an MFA isn't necessary but a community is
AI, analog revival, and the art schools closing in San Francisco

Find Shana on the SFMOMA website and Instagram:
https://www.sfmoma.org/about/eteam-curatorial-staff/
https://www.instagram.com/lopesshana/
Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!
Support the show
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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 get into the question of whether we as photographers should explain our images or let them try and ‘speak for themselves’, why the readings you want to correct are actually a map to your photographic voice, and the two gaps every photograph has to cross, from Garry Winogrand's famous riddle to a passage in 'Art & Fear' by David Bayles and Ted Orland that reframes the distance between what you intended, what you made, and what people see.

Other things I mention:
The moment someone misreads your photo and the correction rises up in your chest
Why you're the one person who can't see your own work cold
Repeated "wrong" readings as a pattern, not noise
What happens if both gaps close completely, and whether a perfect photograph would be worth looking at
Explaining an image versus articulating a body of work, and why timing is the difference
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 - extended episodes & bonus features
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders
The App That Transformed My Art & Mind
https://wakingup.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=3&aff_id=99
Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com
Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay

On this episode, I sat down with David Chancellor, the award-winning documentary photographer behind ‘Hunters’, ‘Handle Like Eggs’, and the Taylor Wessing Prize-winning portrait ‘Huntress with Buck’, for a conversation about the moral grey areas of documentary photography, trophy hunting, wildlife conservation. David has spent decades photographing human-wildlife coexistence across Africa, sleeping beside trophy hunters for weeks at a time, documenting leopard hunting in Namibia that was later stopped, and turning the personal cost of that work, including the collapse of his marriage, into his most intimate project. 
We talked about how beauty gets people to look at what they'd rather turn away from, why access matters more than gear, how a photographer builds trust over years instead of parachuting in, and his current project rewilding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the National Center for Wildlife.
Watch this conversation and you'll understand how just one photograph can open a dialogue that could end an questionable pastime, and what it costs the person holding the camera.
Other things we discussed:
Getting fired from foreign exchange dealing and talking his way into photography school with "below average" work
The lion breeder who learned to see light and made the phone call behind the Taylor Wessing photo
If it pays, it stays: the brutal economics of wildlife conservation
The gamekeeper in Scotland whose hands kill deer and delivered his own son
Whether he has gone numb after decades of watching animals die
Photographing the birth, death, and compensation politics of community conservation in Kenya
David Attenborough, his front door key, and the cost of a legendary life
Film versus digital, the Mamiya 7, and why he shoots one consistent format
AI, authenticity, and what photography loses when everything becomes content
Find David and his work online:
https://www.davidchancellor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/chancellordavid/
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 - extended episodes & bonus features
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders
The App That Transformed My Art & Mind
https://wakingup.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=3&aff_id=99
Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com
Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay

Attention has collapsed, and every photographer feels it. In this Moments of Mood episode, I make the case that this might be the best thing to happen to serious photography in a generation. You'll learn why the photographers who matter from here on won't be the ones who make the most, they'll be the ones who compress the best: one photograph dense enough to stop a stranger mid-scroll and earn the second look. I break down what has actually broken in visual culture (the capacity to stay, not the capacity to look), why posting more is a hiding place, and how a single ambassador image is the doorway that gets your photobook, sequence, and body of work found.
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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 - extended episodes & bonus features
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders
The App That Transformed My Art & Mind
https://wakingup.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=3&aff_id=99
Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com
Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay

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
___________________________________________________
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 - extended episodes & bonus features
https://www.mattjacob.co/insiders
The App That Transformed My Art & Mind
https://wakingup.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=3&aff_id=99
Website:
https://themoodpodcast.com
Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay