Show Notes
Welcome to one of five special episodes recorded live at Peckham 24. In this episode, I speak to Eleonora Agostini about her series, A Study On Waitressing, in which she assembles and re-presents photographs, archival imagery and footage, collage and text as a research method to analyse the theatricality of the everyday and the function of the body as a conduit between observer and observed.
Peckham 24 exists to support the photographic community by providing artists with opportunities to exhibit, share and discuss new work - shining a spotlight on cutting-edge contemporary photography.
The theme for the 8th edition of the festival was Back to the future, bringing together artists who take moments from the past as inspiration to re-stage, re-imagine or re-think existing narratives.
Eleonora is an Italian artist based in London. Her practice shifts between photography, moving image, performance and sculpture, exploring and analysing the difficulties of how human experience is constructed.Her research is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit. Eleonora refers to the every-day as a space full of potential and possibilities for quests, incorporating ordinary objects and activities within her images to express and navigate its different layers and meanings. Follow Eleonora @eleonoraagostini and Peckham 24 @peckham24photo and Gem @gemfletcher on Instagram. If you've enjoyed this episode, PLEASE leave us your feedback in the Apple Podcast store. Thank you for listening to The Messy Truth. We will be back very soon. For all requests, please email [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Messy Truth - Conversations on Photography
In this episode, from my second salon titled, Between Two Worlds which took place in January 2026 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and supported by WePresent. The one day salon is an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how. In this session, Gem Fletcher is joined by Rene Matić and Elle Pérez. Together they discuss, What is the work of art today?
In this episode, from my second salon titled, Between Two Worlds which took place in January 2026 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and supported by WePresent. The one day salon is an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how. In this session, Gem Fletcher is joined by Bruno Ceschel, Brian Paul Lamotte and Lillian Wilkie. Together they discuss, What’s next for PhotoBook publishing?
In this episode, from my second salon titled, Between Two Worlds which took place in January 2026 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and supported by WePresent. The one day salon is an attempt to describe the feeling of existing in two image worlds, the one we think we know, and the new one emerging. We can sense that this new image world operates differently to the one we were socialised in—and yet it’s unclear exactly how. In this session, On Photography And, Gem Fletcher is joined by Jack Davison, Ronan Mckenzie, and Hanna Moon, three artists who have taken risks in an attempt to create new models of publishing, exhibiting and making.
In this episode, On Mystery, Gem Fletcher talks to Aspen Mays about her archival interventions and darkroom transgressions that challenges us to reflect upon the profound experience of looking - looking at us and looking at the world. Aspen’s work exists in a myriad of forms, but what remains consistent through her work is the tension between oppositional forces like irreverence and defiances, the far and the near, construction and deconstruction, knowing and unknowing ,precision and chaos, the ordinary and the exceptional, the visible and the invisible - this is the lifeblood of her work. In short, her innovative practice is about imagining new possibilities of seeing and being.
In this episode, Gem Fletcher talks to Naima Green about her exhibition, ‘Instead, I spin fantasies’ presented at ICP in New York in 2025/26. The show, which was curated by Elisabeth Sherman, grapples with the concept of pregnancy and parenthood through constructed self-portraits, landscapes and still-lifes—blurring the line between documentary, performance, construction and vernacular modes. Throughout the work. Green probes the conventional expectations and representational tropes of motherhood, while also creating an expanded space for considering the experience of pregnancy and parenthood in America.