A Photographic Life - 284: Plus Trish Morrissey

In episode 284 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on the photographic documentation of our own lives and how photographers dress!

Plus this week, photographer Trish Morrissey takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’

Trish Morrissey was born in Dublin in 1967, and now lives in the UK. She works with photography, film and video and has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. Her work is in major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Michael Wilson Center for Photography. Recent projects include Ten People in a Suitcase for Touching from a Distance, for which she was a shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2015 and Face the Collections, a residency and exhibition with Bettina von Zwehl at the Bohuslän Museum, Sweden in 2016. She describes her work as a study of the language of photography through still and moving images, using performance and wit as tools to investigate the boundaries of photographic meaning. Although most of her work features Morrissey as the protagonist, she doesn't consider them to be self portraits, though they can be read that way. She claims to use humour as a tool to disarm the viewer, which evaporates leaving a slow burning psychologically tense afterglow. Weaving fact and fiction, dealing with issues such as family experiences and national identities, feminine and masculine roles, and relationships between strangers. www.trishmorrissey.com

Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com. He is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts.

Scott’s next book Condé Nast Have Left The Building: Six Decades of Vogue House will be published by Orphans Publishing in the Spring of 2024.

© Grant Scott 2023