PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf - Photography Podcast

Photographer and artist Ed Templeton joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to reflect on his evolution from professional skateboarder to photographer and painter, and how early influences like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark shaped his approach to documenting his own life. Templeton discusses his photobook Wires Crossed (Aperture), an intimate look at skate culture from an insider’s perspective, and his collaborative process with editor Lesley A. Martin. The conversation looks into Templeton's hybrid analog and digital workflow and concludes with the development of Contemporary Suburbium (Nazraeli Press), an accordion style book, made in collaboration with his wife, photographer Deana Templeton, highlighting his ongoing engagement with the photobook and everyday subject matter.

https://ed-templeton.com

Ed Templeton (b.1972) is an American painter and photographer whose work reflects human behavior with emphasis on youth subcultures, religious affectation, and suburban conventions using a cinéma vérité approach embracing chance encounters. Templeton is a respected cult figure in the subculture of skateboarding, a two-time world-champion, and Skateboarding Hall of Fame inductee. He is best known for his photographic books and multimedia exhibitions. His work has been exhibited in museums worldwide including MOCA, Los Angeles, ICP, NYC, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunsthalle, Vienna, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SMAK Museum Belgium, Orange County Museum of Art, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.

Photographer and educator Curran Hatleberg returns to PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his latest monograph, Blood Green (TBW Books).

Hatleberg reflects on how the photobook emerged from images left out of his earlier publication, River’s Dream, and how revisiting those omissions opened a new way of thinking about editing, continuity, and the evolving life of a body of work.

He speaks about the ethics at the center of his practice, an engagement with people grounded in mutual curiosity and respect, and the role of presence, both with and without the camera. Now balancing his life as an artist, partner, and father, Hatleberg considers how time reshapes practice. The episode concludes with a meditation on art making as a form of self-portraiture, a record of who we were at a given moment.

https://curranhatleberg.com

https://tbwbooks.com/products/blood-green?_pos=2&_psq=curran&_ss=e&_v=1.0

Curran Hatleberg is a photographer based in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum, MASS MoCA, the International Center of Photography and Higher Pictures. In 2019, Hatleberg was featured in the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works are held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art among others. Hatleberg is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Maryland State Arts Council Grant, a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant, and a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant. He has published five books, most recently Blood Green in 2025. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016, and his second monograph, River’s Dream, was published by TBW Books in 2022. Hatleberg has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Cooper Union and Yale University where he is currently a visiting critic in photography. He holds a BA in painting from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in photography from Yale University.

Ocean Vuong, poet, essayist, novelist, educator, and photographer, joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf for an in-depth conversation about his solo photography exhibition Sõng and the accompanying photobook, presented at CPW. In this episode, Vuong reflects on storytelling across mediums, creative practice, and the discipline behind writing and photography. Drawing from his life experience, he speaks candidly about process, vulnerability, and the courage required to share work publicly. This episode offers grounded insight for artists who question their creative voice or the value of presenting their work.

https://www.oceanvuong.com/

https://cpw.org/exhibition/song/

Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 41 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. 

Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. 

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. 

He currently splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Alejandro Cartagena returns to discuss his mid-career solo exhibition Ground Rules at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, along with the accompanying book published by Aperture. Alejandro and Sasha dig into how both the exhibition and the book came together, from concept to execution. He also reflects on the lasting impact of his seminal project Carpoolers, and how it shaped his thinking around photography, technology, and intent. The conversation expands to the broader cultural stakes of the medium, including Alejandro’s recent investigations into AI-generated imagery.

https://alejandrocartagena.com

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/alejandro-cartagena-ground-rules/

https://aperture.org/books/alejandro-cartagena-ground-rules/

Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others.

Alejandro is a self publisher and co-editor and has created several award wining titles including Insurrection Nation, Studio Cartagena 2021, Santa Barbara Save US, Skinnerboox, 2020, A Small Guide to Homeownership, The Velvet Cell 2020, We Love Our Employees, Gato Negro 2019, Santa Barbara Shame on US, Skinnerboox, 2017, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption, The velvet Cell, 2017, Rivers of Power, Newwer, 2016, Santa Barbara return Jobs to US, Skinnerboox, 2016, Headshots, Self-published, 2015, Before the War, Self-published, 2015, Carpoolers, Self-published with support of FONCA Grant, 2014, Suburbia Mexicana, Daylight/ Photolucida 2010. Some of his books are in the Yale University Library, the Tate Britain, and the 10×10 Photobooks/MFH Houston book collections among others.

Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo Leon in Mexico among others. He has been named an International Discoveries of the FotoFest festival, a FOAM magazine TALENT and an Emerging photographer of PDN magazine. He has also been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award and has been nominated for the Santa Fe Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet Prize, the Photoespaña Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award. His work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper, among others.

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha is joined by photographer, publisher, editor, and educator Nelson Chan. Together, they trace the winding path that led Nelson to his dream job as a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Along the way, Nelson reflects on the “guardian angels” who helped him stay the course, the openness that allowed unexpected opportunities to shape his trajectory, and the community of friends and collaborators who eventually inspired the founding of TIS Books. Sasha and Nelson also talk about the value of building connections, putting yourself out there, and treating your career as a marathon rather than a sprint.

https://www.nelsonchanphotography.com/

https://www.tisbooks.pub/

Nelson Chan was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from Hong Kong and Taiwan and has spent most of his life between the States and Hong Kong. Having grown up between two continents, this immigrant experience influences the majority of his work.

Nelson received his BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Hartford Art School, respectively. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; and 798 Space, Beijing, China. His books are collected in the institutional libraries of The MET, The Guggenheim, SEMOMA, The Whitney Museum, The Harry Ransom Center, and MoMA, among others.

Along with his own photographic work, book publishing and education are extensions of, what Nelson refers to as, an industrious studio practice. He is co-founder of TIS books, an independent art book publisher and was production manager at the Aperture Foundation from 2016-19. In 2025, Nelson was awarded tenure at California College of the Arts but ultimately left the Bay Area to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design as an associate professor of photography.