We recently hosted freelance photographer Asher Svidensky for a free public lecture at the Museum, on 16 March 2016, in a talk about photography, people, storytelling, fish, fire, and some rather impressive birds.
Asher’s work has been featured by National Geographic, the BBC, the Guardian and many other media outlets, and includes projects on Mongolian eagle hunters, Yin-Bou fisherman, and the Miao ‘goddess’ in China. The talk offered a good opportunity to hear Asher discussing some of these projects, talking about his methods, and explaining why he thinks photography can be the “eye candy” which lures you into the fuller story.
Rather than big up his photographic prowess, Asher instead presented his photography mostly as a means to an end. It is the people and their stories, he explained, which interest him more than photography, but striking imagery attests to a strong story.
Some photographers take a lot of time and effort into getting to know the people they are photographing; into creating those relationships and creating the understandings and learning about the culture so they can get more from it and make a better image.
So the image stems from the photographer’s submersion in people and culture, or in the ‘story’, and then itself becomes the route into that story for the reader – the irresistible “eye candy” that whets your appetite. On a slightly less adventurous level we aim to do the same with the natural history collections images on this blog.
You can watch a short excerpt from the talk in this video:
More Than A Dodo 
STUNNING! His work is beyond beautiful. Thank you so much sharing this.