George Georgiou and A Small Voice: Photography and Conversation

A Small Voice is a podcast of long interviews with photographers, and it is made by the London photographer Ben Smith. George Georgiou is a documentary photographer who was one of its early guests. The two names sit together on this address because a London photography talk in July 2017 paired the podcast with Georgiou's work. This page introduces his projects, then looks at the podcast and at the other places where photographers are interviewed at length.

George Georgiou

George Georgiou was born in London in 1961 to Greek Cypriot parents and studied photography at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster. According to his published biography he spent around six years working in Serbia, Greece and eastern Europe before living in Istanbul for four years, and he is a member of the agency Panos Pictures. His work was included in New Photography 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Three projects define his published work, and all three are listed in the books section of his own site.

• Fault Lines/Turkey/East/West (Schilt, 2010) came out of his years living in Turkey. The title points at the book's argument, which is that the familiar framing of the country as a division between east and west is too simple, and that the real divisions run in several directions at once. Editions appeared in French, Greek and Italian in the same year.
• Last Stop (self-published, 2015) was made in London, photographed from the windows of double-decker buses. It is a city project with a fixed method, in which the route rather than the photographer decides what is in front of the camera.
• Americans Parade (self-published, 2019) turns the camera around. Instead of photographing parades, Georgiou photographed the crowds watching them, across towns and cities in the United States. The result is a study of who stands on which side of a street in America.

What links the three is a consistent decision to photograph the ordinary condition of a place rather than its crisis. His awards, listed in the same biography, include World Press Photo awards in 2002 and 2004 and a Pictures of the Year International prize in 2003, but the books he is now known for are slower and more structural than news work.

A Small Voice and who makes it

A Small Voice is hosted and produced by Ben Smith, a photographer based in London. The show, published as A Small Voice: Conversations with photographers and filmmakers, consists of long interviews in which a single photographer talks about their life, their work and their working method. Its title is a reference to W. Eugene Smith. Georgiou appeared as the second episode, in the episode archive on Smith's own site, which is why his name and the podcast became attached to the same evening.

The format matters because it is unusual in photography. An hour of recorded conversation gives a photographer room to describe how a project was funded, how long it took and what failed, which is the material an exhibition caption leaves out. Audio interviews of this kind are often the most detailed public account of a practice that exists.

Other podcasts about documentary photography

A Small Voice is not the only show of its type, and the others listed below are all active and have substantial archives.

• The Candid Frame is hosted by the Los Angeles photographer, writer and educator Ibarionex Perello. It has run since 2006 and had passed 660 episodes by autumn 2026, which makes it one of the longest-running interview podcasts in photography. Episodes are published on Perello's own site with written introductions to each guest.
• PhotoWork Podcast is hosted and executive produced by Sasha Wolf, who ran the Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York for ten years and now directs the PhotoWork Foundation. The foundation's stated mission is to support what it calls post-documentary photographic artists through mentorship and education, and the podcast is one strand of that work. Conversations tend to focus on how a body of work was built and edited, often around a specific monograph.
• Agency and institution podcasts are the third category. Photo agencies, galleries and photography magazines publish interview series alongside their main output, which are useful for recent work but less consistent as archives.

One practical caution applies to all of them. Podcast feeds move between hosting platforms, and older episodes are sometimes trimmed from a free feed while remaining in a paid archive, so the show's own website is more reliable than a third-party aggregator.

Audio has a longer history in documentary photography than the podcast era suggests, and the use of recorded sound alongside stills is covered on our page for Benjamin Chesterton, duckrabbit and Eleanor Macnair. Other photographers written about on this site are indexed on the speakers page, and the full set of pages is in the talks archive.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, it is not connected with A Small Voice, and it does not organise events.