FEATURING WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER AND MENTOR DAVID DUCHEMIN

My mother kept an old biscuit tin in the larder. Inside this tin was the sort of collection that somehow accumulates over a lifetime: old coins, buttons, nuts and bolts, stamps that were no longer worth whatever was printed on them, keys that probably opened something once, and assorted little objects nobody could quite bring themselves to throw away. Years later, the idea of this tin, has found its way into The Photowalk. Mine, though, contains questions.

This week, I open it with one of the show’s great friends, David duChemin, an award-winning wildlife and humanitarian photographer, author, teacher and, for many photographers, a mentor. He tackles questions from the tin, and there are a couple of bigger questions I want to put to him this time about resilience and relevance. Where does resilience come from, and what keeps a creative person moving when confidence disappears, plans go wrong, or life simply gets in the way? Then there’s relevance. As photographers, how much should we care about remaining relevant? Relevant to whom, exactly? And what happens as we get older, as the industry around us changes and our reasons for making photographs change with it?

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MORE ABOUT names, words, THE MUSIC and places FROM TODAY’S SHOW

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Join us in Venice for the Venice ‘26 retreat, photographing a city built on water, light, and ritual as winter settles across the lagoon. Together we’ll wander through early-morning markets, quiet canal edges, hidden monasteries, and the weathered backstreets of Castello and Cannaregio, with time to slow down, take photographs, and build creative confidence in a city that reveals itself gently when the crowds disappear. Places limited.

Find inspiration in David duChemin’s books.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer and one of the founders of Magnum Photos. Working largely with a Leica, he became one of the great names in documentary and street photography, photographing everything from the liberation of Paris to Gandhi’s final days and the communist takeover of China. His 1952 book The Decisive Moment helped give a name to his belief in recognising and catching the brief instant when everything in a photograph comes together.

French humanist photography celebrated everyday life, particularly on the streets of post-war Paris. Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed ordinary people, chance encounters and small moments of daily life.

Willy Ronis was a French photographer best known for his warm, observant pictures of everyday life in Paris. A leading figure in French humanist photography, he photographed workers, families, lovers and street life across much of the 20th century.

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer famous for his dramatic black-and-white photographs of the American West, particularly Yosemite. He was also a gifted printer and helped develop the Zone System for controlling exposure and tonal detail.

Platon is a British portrait photographer known for his striking, close-up portraits of world leaders and cultural figures. His subjects have included Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali and Adele, with his work appearing regularly in TIME and The New Yorker.

Magnum Contact Sheets opens up the working process of Magnum photographers, showing the frames before and after some of photography’s best-known images. Edited by Kristen Lubben, it includes 139 contact sheets from 69 photographers, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold and Elliott Erwitt.

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is a 2002 book about the things that stop us doing creative work. Pressfield calls it “Resistance” — procrastination, fear, self-doubt and all the other ways we manage to avoid getting on with the thing we actually want to do.

Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German explorer and naturalist whose ideas helped shape the way we understand the natural world. Humboldt travelled widely, influenced Darwin and was describing human-induced climate change as early as 1800.

MUSIC LINKS: Ziv Moran wrote today's playout song Coming True. Music on the show is sourced primarily from Artlist and also features in Michael Brennan’s Spotify playlist GoFoto. For Apple Music users, follow this playlist.

Kelvin Brown’s flickr Photowalk inspired group - join by invite by clicking on to THIS LINK.