FEATURING DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER FRAN MAY

Today I feature Fran May, a British photographer whose black-and-white work from the 1970s captures a version of Britain that has largely vanished: northern towns, street markets, pubs, kids playing out, and Brick Lane in London. What makes the photographs remarkable is how unforced they feel. Nothing is staged, nothing is trying too hard. They are just honest slices of ordinary life, made by someone who came to England from the wide open spaces of Canada and Hawaii and found something worth documenting in the terraced streets and shop fronts of a country that still had one foot firmly in the post-war years. Fran worked under the mentorship of Bill Brandt, and it shows in the seriousness with which she approached the everyday.

There's a touch of street about the show because Valerie Jardin returns for another edition of Teach Me Street. The mailbag is as wonderfully unpredictable as ever: Margaret Ellison in New Zealand writes about losing her way photographically and finding it again through writing; Robin Taylor-Hunt, Maurice Webster and Colin Mayer send postcards from India, Venice and what appears to be a particularly chilly beach in Blackpool, respectively; and Gene Westberg is celebrating our profanity-free zone. We’ll remind you of this quarter’s photo assignment, and you’re invited to join the show for this year’s Photowalk meet-up at a country fair to make photographs of people.

Email your stories, thoughts, and pictures to the show. If you can optimize/resize photos to 2,500 pixels wide, that’s always much appreciated. If you’d like to support this show and have access to further content and the midweek Extra Mile show, we’d welcome you as an EXTRA MILER. There’s also our thriving Facebook group, a safe place to meet and talk with photographers of all interests, the Photowalk YouTube channel, plus the show is featured on Instagram, VERO and X.

As well as our Extra Milers, we’re also supported by our friends at Arthelper.ai who make marketing easier, helps more people find your work, and keeps your voice true—so you can get back to what you love most: making art. Enter PHOTOWALK at checkout to receive 30 days of the pro version free.

PLEASE HELP TO BUILD OUR COMMUNITY BY SHARING THIS EPISODE TO YOUR FAVOURITE SOCIAL PLATFORMS

LEARN:

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

Join us on the Black Isle near Inverness for the Scotland ‘26 retreat, staying on a working soft-fruit farm with Highland views. The retreat includes small creative workshops, from photogravure printing to sound and writing sessions, plus plenty of time to walk, talk and make photographs together.

Enjoy HALFWAY TO MAYBE, Monday, Wednesday and Friday on your favourite podcast player apps: APPLE, SPOTIFY, AMAZON MUSIC, or by adding the RSS FEED to your podcast app of choice.

Giles Penfound appears in a two-part series, where we make one single photograph of one single tree using a 5×4 camera. Episodes 520 and 521.

Bill Brandt was a British photographer whose stark, dramatically contrasted images of English society, from the coal miners of the north to the bombed streets of wartime London, made him one of the most distinctive and influential figures in twentieth-century photography.

Kelburn is a hilltop suburb of Wellington, New Zealand's capital, perched just minutes from the city centre and reached most memorably by the iconic red cable car, a place of botanic gardens, university buildings and wide harbour views that somehow manages to feel like a village despite sitting on the edge of one of the world's great compact cities.

New Harmony is a tiny town of around 250 people tucked into the hills of southern Utah, sitting above 5,000 feet and ringed by the peaks of Pine Valley Mountain and the canyons of Kolob, where Mormon pioneers settled in the 1860s and deer still wander through the streets in the evening as though nobody told them it was a town.

Aphantasia is the inability to visualise mental images. When someone asks you to picture a red apple, there is simply nothing there, no image at all, just the concept of the thing, and while that might sound like a loss, many people with aphantasia have no idea it's unusual until the moment someone describes actually seeing pictures in their head, and everything suddenly feels rather strange.

Mary Oliver was an American poet who spent most of her life paying closer attention to the natural world than most of us manage in a lifetime, finding in marshes, grasslands and the ordinary business of geese and grasshoppers a kind of spiritual instruction that she wrote about with such directness and warmth that her work reached people who wouldn't normally go near poetry.

MUSIC LINKS: Christine Noel wrote today's playout song Garden. 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.