The Messy Truth - Conversations on Photography

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Naima Green about her exhibition, ‘Instead, I spin fantasies’ presented at ICP in New York in 2025/26. The show, which was curated by Elisabeth Sherman, grapples with the concept of pregnancy and parenthood through constructed self-portraits, landscapes and still-lifes—blurring the line between documentary, performance, construction and vernacular modes. Throughout the work. Green probes the conventional expectations and representational tropes of motherhood, while also creating an expanded space for considering the experience of pregnancy and parenthood in America.

Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, installation, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritises the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesising archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.

Naima has had solo shows at Astor Weeks, Baxter Street CCNY, and Fotografiska, all NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and Gallery Factory, Minneapolis, MN, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Musuem of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Follow Naima @naimagreen & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Daniel Shea about his latest book, Distribution which began with a simple question: how do you photograph a forest? In this roving conversation they explore the genesis of Distribution while discussing everything from the personal and often painful journey of artmaking to the future of photobooks and much more in between. What is interesting about Daniel's work is his simultaneous desire for order and complexity - essentially offering more rigorous ways to think about how we move through and experience the world.

Daniel Shea is an artist based in New York City. He has published a number of books including Distribution, Ex Nihilo and 43-35 10th Street. He has exhibited internationally including at The Pavilion of the United States during the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Foam, Amsterdam, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. He has been a resident artist at Light Work and His photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, Frieze and Fantastic Man

Follow Daniel @danielpshea & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Amelia Abraham about her latest book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, where she crafts an expansive visual exploration of queer nightlife in all its many iterations. The book is a love letter to those who went out and stayed out, felt the urge to document or reflect what was happening, or who have used their artmaking to dream new modes of being into existence. The book also asks what our decades-long quest to catalogue and understand nightlife spaces through photography and film can tell us about our various relationships with them, reflecting on the ways that photography intersects with pleasure, politics, and protest.

Amelia Abraham is a journalist and author from London. She writes for Art Review, The Guardian, The Observer, Dazed, AnOther, and other titles on arts, culture and more. Her books include Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ+ Rights. Her first edited photography book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, was published this year by MACK Books.

Follow Amelia @amelia_abraham & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Ahndraya Parlato about her latest book, TIME TO KILL an interrogation of gendered aging, unpacking the ideals of beauty, caretaking, and maternal and domestic duty imposed on women over the course of their lives. In our roving conversation, we talk about selfhood, motherhood, sacrifice, visibility, censorship, the potency when you get text and image to work as you imagined and what happens to a project after its release.

Ahndraya Parlato has a BA from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has published four books: TIME TO KILL [Mack Books 2026] Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon(in collaboration with Gregory Halpern), Études Books, 2014.
She has exhibited work at: Spazio Labo, in Bologna, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. Ahndraya has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop, and grants from Light Work, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has been a nominee for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. She has taught in the Bard College and Cornell Image Text MFA programs and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Follow Ahndraya @Ahndraya_Parlato & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Chieska Fortune Smith about her journey through photography and the role of collective learning in her practice. She came to photography through Flickr, the social media platform which earnestly engaged so many of us in the medium. It was a place to upload and share your pictures, while getting feedback from other enthusiasts. Chi’s trajectory pivoted when met Brett Walker on the platform, a photographer in his own right, who mentored a group of budding photographers in London. This model of collective learning was formative for Chi and her peers and gave her the foundations of which she continues to build upon today. In our conversation we talk about the different strands of life, culture and influence which inform her work, what keeps her going and how she moves through the photo industry.

Chieska Fortune Smith is born of an African-American soul singer and a Japanese classical dancer. Her work is rooted in classical timelessness and stories with twists of obscurity and illusion. She is heavily influenced by street photography and vintage found imagery from the early 20th century. She has featured in prominent magazines and books including Sixteen Journal, Vanity Fair, and designer Simone Rocha’s debut monograph, and is currently working on a personal project that delves into her Japanese and black American roots. She is based in London.

Follow Chi @chieskafortunesmith & Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email hello@gemfletcher.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.