A Photographic Life - 313: Plus Tria Giovan

A Photographic Life

In episode 313 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on the importance of being professional and not egotistical when working with clients and discovering who you really are through photography. Plus this week, photographer Tria Giovan takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Tria Giovan was born in 1961, in Chicago, Illinois, raised on St Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Now she is a New York based photographer who is drawn to subjects that intertwine the personal and the observational. The in-depth and long-term nature of her projects is driven by curiosity, emotional connection and a desire to create images that reflect an informed and humanistic engagement with the external world. Often working with material from her archive spanning across decades, she investigates concepts of preservation and legacy by creating visual testaments with her photographs. Her diverse subject exploration has ranged from New York City’s Lower East Side to an ongoing photographic journal of her family and ancestral home in Rhode Island, to a six-year project photographing 1990s Cuba, as well as a dedicated decade of site-specific images of the coastal shores of Long Island. She is the author of four monographs to date: Loisaida New York Street Work 1984 – 1990, 2023, The Cuba Archive Photographs 1990 – 1996, 2017, Sand Sea Sky, 2012 and Cuba: The Elusive Island, 1996. He work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, and her photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library, among others. Giovan's work has appeared in Aperture, Harpers, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, Vogue, and many other publications. www.triagiovanphotography.com Dr.Grant Scott After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018. Scott’s next book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is now on sale. © Grant Scott 2024