A few weeks ago I had a conversation on this podcast with our common friend Valérie Jardin. Most of the discussion we had was centered around an article published on the New York Daily News and titled When your photograph harms me: New York should look to curb unconsensual photography of women.

It would have been easy to discount the article as yet another rant about street photography and its purported invasion of privacy, but the fact that it was written by an Asian woman got me thinking.

It made me think that photography is mostly a white guys’ club. Women are a minority and people of color, especially black, are an even smaller minority. Black women photographers? I don’t know any, personally.

We white guys often tend to overlook this fact and can become race-blind and gender-blind. When I look at the issue of photographing strangers in the street, it’s easy for me to think that I should apply a sort of golden rule: I am not going to treat others in ways that I wouldn’t want to be treated, but is that enough?

The problem with that attitude is that I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in front of the camera, but I’m a white guy, not a woman of color, for example. Maybe I should try to imagine what it feels like to be in front of the camera as a woman of color. It might not be exactly the same.

In order to get a different perspective on this issue, I invited Ibarionex Perello to the show. Ibarionex is not only a great street photographer, and educator, and a podcast host (his show, The Candid Frame, has published 560 episodes as of today) but he's also a black person. I thought it would be interesting to hear how it feels to be both in front and behind a camera as a person of color, in today's world and especially in the USA.

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Our guest this week is Swedish landscape photographer Mattias Sjölund. Mattias has an inherent passion for photographing and hiking in nature. He is the founder of Foto Magica, one of the leading organizers of photo tours and workshops in Scandinavia.

We asked Mattias about his favorite wilderness locations in and around Sweden and discovered a number of places that are not excessively popular yet, but are definitely deserving of a visit, including Abisko, Knuthöjdsmossen, Gotland Rauks, and Jämtland.

• Foto Magica
• Personal website
• Instagram

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Matt Bishop, our guest for this week’s episode of the podcast, is an Australian who visited Italy many years ago, fell in love with the place and one of its people and never looked back.

Matt was raised up in the small seaside town of Sorrento, Australia. During his childhood years there was certainly a strong artistic background that influenced his photography later in life. Matt was drawn toward landscape photography after spending months climbing the mountains in Switzerland, and after soon arriving in London in 2002, he purchased his first 35mm Camera. Over the years his progression into capturing landscapes was a slow experimental one, until recently where his workflow in digital photography became far more refined. Today Matt resides in Rome, Italy, surrounded by ancient forests, medieval castles, rolling pastures and alpine jagged mountains.

In recent years his main photographic projects involve collaborating with Pentax Europe, the Landscape Photography Workshops in Patagonia, private post production instructions in Rome, and recently discovering new locations in the surrounding “Medieval Italy”.

Together with Matt, we explored his favorite locations for landscape photography in Italy, including Tuscany, the Dolomites, and the less well known, but equally stunning, region of Abruzzo. We also talked about his experiences in Patagonia.

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