EP30 - The Flow Photographica Relaunch Monologue with Alex Schneideman

Flow Photographica - Episode 30: INTRO TO FLOW PHOTOGRAPHIC

Episode Overview

In this episode of Flow Photographica, host Alex Schneideman reintroduces the podcast with a fresh vision, tracing his journey through photography—from childhood awe in a darkroom to founding Flow Photographic Gallery, becoming Artistic Director of Photo Oxford and the development of the Pictures from the Garden project.

Alex reflects on:

• The early days of Photographica and its rebirth as Flow Photographica
• A transformative moment in a darkroom that sparked a lifelong passion for photography
• His journey through photography, from assisting in London studios to founding Flow Photographic
• The creation of Pictures from the Garden, a project honouring the late photographer Paddy Summerfield
• The role of publishing in a photographer's career and the importance of books in photographic storytelling

This episode is a personal exploration of what it means to live a photographic life and an invitation to continue the quest for understanding the medium.

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Links & Resources Mentioned

Flow Photographic & Gallery

• 🌍 Flow Photographic Studio & Gallery – flowphotographic.com

Photographers & Projects Mentioned

• 📖 James Ravilious – An English Eye – Beaford Archive
• 📷 Paddy Summerfield – Mother and Father – Dewi Lewis Publishing
• 📚 Pictures from the Garden – A collaboration with photographers Jem Southam, Alys Tomlinson, Sian Davey, Vanessa Winship, Matthew Finn & Nik Roche

Featured Photographers:

• Jem Southam – jemsoutham.co.uk
• Alex Schneideman - alexschneideman.net
• Alys Tomlinson – alystomlinson.co.uk
• Sian Davey – siandavey.com
• Vanessa Winship – vanessawinship.com
• Matthew Finn – mattfinn.com
• Nik Roche – nikroche.com

Photography Institutions & Festivals

• 🏛️ The Bodleian Library (Holds Paddy Summerfield’s archive) – bodleian.ox.ac.uk
• 🎨 The Photographers’ Gallery (London) – thephotographersgallery.org.uk
• 📷 Photo Oxford Festival – photooxford.org

Book Publishing & Design

• 📖 Want More – Published by Art/Books (Andrew Brown) – artbookspublishing.co.uk
• 📘 Dewi Lewis Publishing (Paddy Summerfield’s publisher) – dewilewis.com
• 🎨 Herman Lelie & Stefania Bonelli (Book design)

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Connect with Alex Schneideman

• 📸 Instagram: @flowphotographic
• 🌍 Website: flowphotographic.com

🎧 Subscribe & Listen: Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

🔔 Support the Show: If you love Flow Photographica, consider sharing, rating, and reviewing the podcast!

TRANSCRIPT

Ep 30 - INTRO TO FLOW PHOTOGRAPHICA

Hello, Alex Schneideman here welcoming you back to ‘Flow Photographica’, a new look podcast that used to be called just ‘Photographica’. 

 

I started Photographica as I start almost everything; to satisfy an urge - or obsession would be a better way of putting it. 

 

Back in 2016 when I recorded the first interviews podcasting was a relatively new medium and I wanted to see how it worked. I made almost thirty episodes and then I got busy with work and life and, what had started with a clear plan became fuzzy. And with the fuzziness, indecision and with that the dissipation of the creative energy required for this sort of endeavour. 

 

But much has changed since then, both in the photography world and for me. We had a big old lockdown which for some was a disaster and for others, many artists, was a boon - a time to take stock and to decide what was important. I started a Masters and, having never taken part in further education fulfilled a dream to go to university.

Just before lockdown I moved the Flow studio from Portobello to Kensal Green, less than a mile but a world apart. And with that I opened a gallery dedicated to showing documentary work, Flow Photographic Gallery. 

 

When you put these two things together as well as a spell as Artistic Director for Photo Oxford (which would never have come about if it weren’t for a Masters and a new gallery) then you will find me trying to forge something out of this amalgam while, at the same time, carrying on with my ‘day job’ at Flow making prints, scans and repro etc.

 

The upshot of this desire to bring together these threads is this podcast and its renaissance. I love photography. I have loved photography since I was about eight when, in the late Seventies, my father took me to a photographic studio somewhere in London - this company made the catalogues for my father’s kitchen supply firm. A kind man in a lab coat took me into a room lit red and smelling overwhelmingly exotic. He showed me to a bench where a strangely tall machine shone a light on to a white board. In this rectangular shape of light I could make out the dim form of a woman, ¾ length but in the wrong distribution of tones that made no sense at all. The shape of her was all that told me this was a person. He switched this image off and placed a piece of paper where the image had been. That strange image of a woman appeared again for a few seconds. The light went off and he removed the paper and placed it in a tray containing a pale liquid. He rocked the tray. In the red gloom a sheet of white paper with nothing on it floated in the liquid. And then a faint image appeared out of nowhere. I began to recognise that the forming image, no denser than a murmur, actually contained infinite and recognisable detail. In this instant I felt the profound magic of photography. As the image continued to form the man removed the sheet and ripped it in two. I was shocked - whoever was in that picture would be terribly upset. He placed one half of the image back in the same tray and the other he put in to a second and then third tray where he left it. 

 

After perhaps a minute he removed the second shred of paper and followed the process he had with its other half. Suddenly the room was illuminated and he showed me how one piece of paper contained a denser image than the other which had spent less time in the first tray - the developer. 

 

This was magic. He washed and dried those bits of paper and gave them to me in a glassine slip. Those shreds of paper are long gone but something had indelibly changed in me, in my soul, and from that moment on I wanted to know photography, to be become photographic.  

 

Later at boarding school, where I had a reasonably unhappy time, there was a darkroom and then photography became a sanctuary. I was a fish out of water - arriving as a plump’ish, Jew’ish boy from London into a sealed community of sons of the landed gentry who knew not only each other but where their own DNA had developed for perhaps a thousand years and more. Like a fish doesn’t feel wet I had no idea I was that different to anyone, until I arrived at that remote school, deep in the middle of a beautiful English nowhere. 

 

My apparent ‘difference’ and a certain belligerence got me noticed, and not in a good way. I was reminded that being a Jew was a bad thing (it wasn’t something I had ever thought about so I didn’t know why it meant so much to them) and was physically attacked in ways that would be criminally investigated now, but this was the Eighties and you didn’t talk.

 

The school had a darkroom that was shambolic and unloved. But happily it was neglected on the whole and I discovered that here was heaven. Again that smell of dev, stop and fixer became inextricably linked to a sense of wonder and the potential for deep satisfaction. I spent every minute I could here. 

 

Nobody taught photography at the school so it was a case of finding your way through trial and error. The number of thin, pink rolls of film I disappointedly pulled from the Paterson reel still sting to this day - the great pictures lost to ignorance. But the joy of developing a roll of film that you could then make an image from; burning and dodging until you got just the right balance, hours eaten by joy and ignorance of the world around you - that darkroom was the making of me. A footnote - I took both O and A levels in photography without one bit of input from the school. I failed both. I left school with one D in English - a technical pass if not a recognised one. Luckily I had never even thought of going to university.

 

After a few years as a commie chef and generally working in various London restaurants I found my way into photography by assisting in studios in London. I worked with a photographer called Peter Rauter, then a leading advertising photographer who became a great friend and mentor. Peter was hugely talented and frustrated. Despite our friendship and the allure of a successful career in commercial photography I knew this wasn’t for me  - However it gave me a classical training in the medium and I got to know the network of labs, now almost disappeared, around London that sprang from the newspaper world around Fleet Street. 

 

After completing my apprenticeship in studio photography I left - disillusioned and confused. And feeling myself to be a failure - to have had this opportunity to work with amazing equipment, travel the world etc, etc and all for nothing. A dead end. I had fucked up and a life in photography was apparently not for me. I left and did other jobs, never loving my work but falling in love and getting married to Sophie, a bookseller. I hated my work, mainly with computers now, and I was awful to be around. But, in about 2000, Sophie went to a bookfair one weekend and somebody, who knew Sophie well enough to know that her husband had at one time been a photographer, gave her a book to give to me thinking I might like it. It was a casually kind gesture and it changed my life. 

 

The book was ‘An English Eye’ by James Ravilious. Not only are the pictures breathtaking and humane, like HCB but with more heart, but he gave his recipe for processing and his photographic technique. Ravilious lived in a small rural community in Devon. From the 1970’s to the 1990’s his photographic life was spent recording this community with a commission from the Beaford Archive, a local arts centre, and he did this over three decades with the sensitivity of a poet. His photographs were his life. Reading this book, over and over again, I could see that here was a route to return to photography - it was not to make money from commissions but to print for other people - something I had loved doing as an assistant and had gotten quite good at - and to make my own work in the spirit of Ravilious - work about small places and the fellow humans that occupy them. 

 

That idea to print was the beginning of what would later become known as Flow Photographic and was the regaining of my photographic life. Being free to photograph without the dead hand of a commercial brief was my liberation and allowed me to engage with photography in the way that I had always wanted to - to become as completely a photographic person as it was possible for me to be.

 

This feeling I have for photography is nothing strange and certainly quite common. It has been my greatest pleasure to meet older and younger people, men and women, who share the raw love for this medium. 

 

Along the way, and particularly, since I posted the last ‘Photographica’ episode, the wish I had as an 8 year old boy has turned into a reality. It really is extraordinary what has happened in the last ten years. It started with finally having the balls to look for a publisher for a body of work about consumerism. This was where my luck turned. In 2105 a very lovely man called Andrew Brown, who had been the chief commissioning editor at Thames and Hudson, had recently set up his own imprint - Art/Books. 

 

They mainly published contemporary art but ventured into photography occasionally. I was introduced to Andrew by the legendary book designing couple and life partnership of Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli. Herman said Andrew had seen the pictures and wanted to meet me. In what turned out to be a very short drink in a pub in Maida Vale (In had to pick children up from school) Andrew offered me a publishing deal. 

It wasn’t a great deal for me - I’d be lucky to see a penny from years of work but my photographs would be printed and distributed all over the world. 

 

I couldn’t believe it! Idashed from dashed from the pub to the nursery all thinking, fuck fuck fuck! 

 

That book was Want More and it opened more doors for me than anything else I could reasonably have done to engage more deeply in my chosen nook of documentary photography. 

 

Note to listeners - if you have a chance to publish a book, do it. So long as you are confidant of the quality of your work and you feel the publishers are working with you, a book of your work will pay dividends , but almost certainly not direct financial ones! Lookijng back there are things I would have done differently. The team that worked on it; Andrew, Herman and Stefania were all so experienced and had worked together a lot. I didn’t have the confidence to insert myself as much into the process as I would now. For example, I did not write a text for the book and there were no captions. These are two things I would do differently now. The book was printed at EBS in Verona without any input from me. There is no better place to have a book printed and, even now, the photographs sparkle on the page in beautiful and subtle duotone magic. This was thanks to Herman, and left to my own devices, I would never have known how to get the best out of the printers. So I balance what I missed through inexperience with the enormous expertise that brought the book to fruition. 

 

There was some decent press for Want More - Elizabeth Roberts, the then editor of Black and White Magazine, a gave the book a good deal of space in the journal. 

 

I am an eternal and appalling opportunist - it may be the immigrant blood coursing through my veins. I seized the opportunity of having met and got on with Elizabeth. She commissioned me to write a monthly column on ideas behind photography. It was here that I got to make mistakes and develop a way of writing about photography that was mine, rather than a clumsy simulacrum of better writers. 

 

My work with the magazine survived Elizabeth’s departure and I continued to write pieces for several years, morphing the column into a series of essays on influential books of British photo documentary. In fact you can hear my conversation with Don McCullin in the following episode of Flow Photographica. I sat down with the great man to discuss his book, ‘In England’ and we didn;’t restrict the conversation to that one book - I mean, how could you?

 

I met Paddy Summerfield and his soon to be wife, Patricia Baker Cassidy in Oxford in 2016. Like a lot of people I loved his book, ‘Mother and Father’ and when I chanced upon the couple at a friend’s book launch in the city, I was star struck. But I got over that and that very night the three of us went for a drink together at some pub that only Oxford denizens could ever find. I’ve never found it again. I arranged to come back to visit Paddy at his home in north Oxford, the scene of Mother and Father itself. I returned a few weeks after our first meeting with a recorder and we sat down to discuss Paddy’s life and work - this turned into Episode 17 which you can listen to now. 

 

Paddy, Patricia and I became friends fast and I became one of the lucky people to whom Paddy would send frequent pictures to made on his extremely clunky flip phone. When we moved the Flow studio to Kensal Green, Paddy would become the first person to be shown in the new Flow Photographic Gallery. 

 

A note here, and possibly continuing on the theme of opportunism - In 2018, the arts writer, Hettie Judah, a very old friend, asked me to take pictures of certain places in London known for their connection to London’s historic and contemporary artworld and some of the leading artists involved in it. As we skirmished about London Hettie opened a whole world to me that I did not know existed. Art runs strong and deep in London. I kind of knew that but not really as it turned out. In particular the south east of London; Lewisham, Peckham, Deptford held so many tiny art galleries tucked away in improbable places. It was thrilling. One place, Matt’s Gallery in Bermondsey, was nothing more than a front room of terraced Victorian house containing a six foot square white cube, neon lit. From this tiny, impossibly residential location the careers of many leading artist had been launched. Concurrently to this project we were moving the studio from where we’d been for 11 years to a new premises in Kensal Green, around the corner from where I live. 

 

We had to fit out the new premises from scratch and, being exposed to all these extraordinary art spaces, I thought why not build my own, on the walls of the new studio? This became Flow Photographic Gallery and since the first exhibition of Paddy’s ‘Holiday Pictures’ we have given shows to Matt Finn, Izabella Jedrezjik, Ian Macdonal, Deanna Dikeman and, as I write soon to Jem Southam and Barbara Bosworth and Judith Black alongside Deanna again later this year. 

 

So Paddy, Patricia and my friendship and trust grew and grew. I became a frequent visitor (and photographer) of Paddy and his garden of photographic wonders. And then, sometime around 2021, Paddy became sicker with an illness that was already besetting him when he showed at FPG in 2019. The three of us would sit in the garden, on the white plastic chairs that his book had turned into icons, discussing the future. Paddy wanted to know that the garden would be preserved. We all did. We kicked around different ways of making this happen, everything from asking the National Trust to taking over or giving it to the Martin PArr Foundation - none of these were at all likely to happen. I suggested, as a last resort, that should we fail to guarantee the physical preservation of the garden we could preserve it through photography, and that we ask some photographers who knew Paddy’s work to come and visit. Beyond that we didn’t have another good idea. 

 

At the time, I was working on the colour separations for Stanley Barker on Jem Southam’s new book, ‘Four Winters’. I can remember thinking (highly opportunistically), “if Jem would say yes that would be an amazing start”. I sent an email to Jem and received a reply almost immediately, that yes he would love to be involved and had long been a fan of Paddy’s. A side note - Jem entered this project without asking who else was involved. I was prepared for this question and would have answered that Paddy himself had wanted Jem to take part, but the question was never asked. Feeling the confidence of one yes from Jem, I went on to ask Alys Tomlinson, Sian Davey, Vanessa Winship, Matthew Finn (who is a friend to be fair) and Nik Roache. Not one of them asked who else was involved. They all accepted without complication or, seemingly, hesitation. I would like to say to all of them now how grateful I am for their engagement in the project that would be come, Pictures from the Garden. It was life affirming that some of our greatest photographers were as great human beings as they were practitioners. I love them all and have made more friends as a result. Thank you Matt, Alys, Vanessa, Jem, Nik and Sian. A side note - I’d like to mention Matt Finn - Matt has both the greatest knowledge of photography and an endless desire to discuss and argue about it. Matt has been a great collaborator and I hope to continue hatching schemes with him for a long time to come.

 

So with these wonderful photographers busy visiting Paddy and Patricia, often making several visits and with a lockdown Masters burning in my opportunistic pocket, I got a call from the Photo Oxford team who were preparing for the 2023 edition of the festival. 

 

They asked if I’d be happy to show the work from Paddy’s garden which at the time was not complete. I said potentially yes and they said they were still waiting to appoint a new Artistic Director before committing to the show. I asked if I could I apply. So I did and that was that. I had a new role.

 

By January 2023 the photographers had completed their work and we were contemplating what to do next, mindful of two things; Paddy’s failing health and Photo Oxford’s spring timetable. Now two more very important people came to the fore; Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery and Dewi Lewis, the great publisher of photography and, specifically, of Paddy’s work. 

 

Clare I’d met when, on a day of sheet rain in north west London, she turned up on her bike to see Matthew Finn’s exhibition at the gallery. She was so enthusiastic about Matt’s work and clearly engaged in the subject generally, and, not to mention soaked. 

 

Clare so impressed me that years later, when I was wondering about how to juggle everything on my plate -  my role as Artistic Director, my day job at Flow, and the ongoing coordination of the Pictures from the Garden. I thought of Clare, wrote to her and to my amazement she said yes and that TPG would back the exhibition at the North Wall in Oxford. And with that PFTG became a Photographers’s Gallery exhibition with Clare designing and running it. 

 

Around the same time I started to talk to Dewi about the possibility of publishing a book of the garden pictures. Dewi had published four volumes of Paddy’s work already and had provided him with a public that recognised his work. Dewi and his wife Caroline are legends of photographic publishing. I have had the privilege to spend time with Dewi and I can attest that he is both one of the most feeling and humane people I have met in photography (or anywhere) and has impeccable integrity. 

 

So Clare put the exhibition together and Dewi put the book together. It was a highlight of my life to spend three days with Dewi in Verona printing PFTG at the very place where my book Want More had been printed many years before.

 

Paddy survived much longer than people expected him to and made it to both the exhibition and a garden visit made by his friends and fans during the festival in May 2023, just as the trees bore their greenest leaves and daisy’s pushed, for the first time, through the roughly mown grass. Paddy gave a speech. Many people cried. 

 

Paddy died in April 2024. And now, at the time of writing, this being February 2025 I am looking forward to the opening of a major retrospective of Paddy work at the Bodleian Library which now holds his archive. 

 

Richard Ovenden, the visionary boss of the Bodleian who has turned it into our most active institutional collector of photography, asked me to curate the exhibition with Patricia.

 

As I write these words it is as if they come from a dream. Can this be me I’m writing about? I continue to work on my own photographic projects, now turning more to film and am surrounded by a photographic world. Thanks to Sophie, my ever supporting wife and the forbearance of my children, I live in photography. 

 

When I think of the eight year old boy, that day in the strange dark room, I don’t feel a bit different. I just can’t believe my luck.

 

There is one question that I can’t answer though, and I hope I never will.

How can a machine reflect the human heart?  How can this impossible conundrum exist in our universe with all its laws and particularities? A machine that tells the story of the human heart? On paper its impossible but this is what photography is. A beautiful, sustaining, endlessly fascinating contradiction. Perhaps this is the question I have been trying to answer since that first moment in the darkroom. If so then this is what this podcast is about… The ongoing quest to know more, to become more - photographic. 

 

Thanks for listening. 

 

Good bye.