The MOOD Podcast

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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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.

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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
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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
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Website:
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In this solo episode of Moments of Mood, you'll learn why the flood of AI images is about to make real, human photography more valuable, not less, and how to find the voice that's unmistakably yours.
I break down what AI really means for emerging photographers, starting with VSCO's "your eye can't be generated" campaign and the paradox that the same company also builds the AI tools and sells the reassurance back to you.
Drawing on Josef Koudelka's legendary photographs, the "revenge of the humanities," and his own work in a disappearing place, I argue that the crisis was/is never AI, it was handing the verdict on your work to everything outside yourself, and that scarcity, taste, and lived experience are about to become a photographer's most valuable assets.
Other touch points in this commentary:
Why your photography voice feels fragmented, and the real reason behind it
The 2am fear that your eye might be "ordinary"
Why a machine can render anything but can't be the witness
What an AI company founder says about the value of the humanities
The single reflection to find the one photograph that's truly yours
_________________________________
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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IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay