Photographer is a six-part docuseries that delves into the personal and professional lives and artistic sensibilities of several prominent photojournalists. Each episode focuses on an individual photographer and explores their upbringing, inspirations, and artistic drives. The series also sheds light on the photographers’ relationships with their respective works. Interested in knowing about the Photographer Season 2 Release Date? This is everything we have figured out.

Season 1 debuted on National Geographic on March 18, 2024, and will begin streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu on March 19.

Here’s all the Photographer Season 2 release date information we know so far, and all the details on when it is coming out.

Is there a Photographer Season 2 release date?

Photographer Season 2 does not have an official release date, but it will likely be announced in the future.

As of March 2024, there is no announcement about the sophomore season of Photographer. This is not unusual as the inaugural season just premiered, and National Geographic will likely observe how it performs across multiple platforms before deciding the future.

Season 1 features some of the most extraordinary photojournalists active today, including Paul Nicklen, Anand K Varma, and Cristina Mittermeier. The series can potentially go on for a very long time with each season focusing on a different group of visual storytellers. ComingSoon will provide an update if and when there is an official announcement about the second season of the show.

Where is Photographer Season 2 coming out?

Photographer Season 2 could come out on National Geographic.

This is because season 1 of Photographer premiered on the same network. Just like season 1, the second season might also stream on Hulu and Disney Plus.

The official synopsis for Photographer reads:

“Photographer will tell the intensely personal stories of the world’s greatest visual storytellers and artists, from how they found themselves behind a camera to how they dedicate themselves to the endless pursuit of perfecting their craft.”

A new book, Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840 – 1960, takes an in-depth look at the development of the art form during a particularly tumultuous period in the country’s history. Upon the introduction of the daguerreotype sometime in the 1840s, West Africans immediately embraced photography, in part because it dovetailed with a cultural practice known as xoymet, a Wolof term meaning “to let someone catch a glimpse of something intimate.”   

HYPERALLERGIC

As the April 8 total solar eclipse passes over Rochester, shutterbugs of all stripes will try to capture the spectacle. But experts urge people to do so with care and forethought.

When it comes to photographing the eclipse, the rules mirror those for viewing the event, said Christye Sisson, director of Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.

“You would not want to point your camera of any kind, smartphone or otherwise, at the sun without using a specially designed filter for that purpose,” Sisson said. “And so, in the simplest terms, if you can’t look at it, your camera shouldn’t look at it directly, either.”

Don’t brick your phone … get a filter

Just as looking at the sun without proper eyewear can cause permanent damage to your vision, pointing a digital camera at the sun without the appropriate filter can quickly cause some — or all — of its sensor to burn out.

Sisson said that anyone who wants to photograph the sun on eclipse day should get the proper filters for their cameras or phones from a reputable retailer.

No, eclipse glasses don’t count

She also advised against substituting eclipse glasses for a filter on your smartphone, which probably has more than one lens, or on other types of cameras.

“If the filters are not sort of absolutely flush, and absolutely covering all those lenses, then you risk damage to your phone,” Sisson said.

Absolutely don’t do this

It’s also a very bad idea to look at the sun through a camera lens. Sisson recommended using cameras’ digital viewfinders and avoiding the optical ones.

She added that she’s been encouraging her students to train their lenses on their surroundings during the eclipse, capturing people’s reactions or experimenting with the unique light.

3:38 of magic time

There is one phase of the eclipse where people are able to look at the sun without special glasses, and cameras can photograph it without filters. That’s during the 3 minutes and 38 seconds of totality, when the moon completely blocks the sun.

But if even a sliver of the sun is showing, viewing or photographing it without the appropriate protective gear can result in damage.

Still have questions?

NASA has an FAQ with all sorts of information on the eclipse, including how to safely view it. And the American Astronomical Society has developed a webpage explaining how to safely photograph eclipses.

For the second episode of the series, we met with internationally acclaimed photographer Edgar Martins, the winner of Photographer of the Year title in the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards, to dive deeper into the concept behind his creations. His photographic artistry extends beyond the confines of a photograph, delving into the realms of philosophy, sociology, and cultural critique, cultivating works based on themes such as war, conflict, the concept of absence and much, much more. He currently resides and works between Bedford (a quintessential historical British town north of London) and Lisbon, where he gave us some insights on his past and current works and shared with us his creative process.

“Photography for me has always been a medium built around conceptual tensions.”

Can you tell us about your projects?

My work has covered many subjects over the years, from topics ranging from mobility, technology, the generation power, modernity, death, incarceration, conflict, and even language itself. From a philosophical point of view, I’m very interested in topics like absence, photographic ontology, and things such as that.

Photography for me has always been a medium built around conceptual tensions. And so it offers me a means to bring together irresolvable contradictions, often challenging, but also questioning our convictions and our expectations. It is true that I’ve worked on different themes over the years, but the guiding thread between them is a rethinking of the representation of that particular theme, whether it would be incarceration or how we talk about war and conflict in today’s world.

I can give you a very concrete example: the project that won the Sony World Photography Awards last year in 2023. That project is based on a story of loss and how we talk about loss. In 2011, a very close friend, who was a photojournalist, traveled to North Africa, in particular to Libya to cover the conflict that had just surfaced between pro and anti-Gaddafi forces. He traveled with three colleagues and a few days after arriving in the country, they were forcefully abducted by Gaddafi backed militia on the front line around the city of Brega – an industrial city on the Libyan coastline. We thought that he’d been kidnapped, but two months later, when his friends were finally released, we found out that he’d actually been shot dead on the very first day. His mortal remains are missing to this day.

I decided to travel to North Africa to retrace my friend’s journey, to meet with myriad people involved or affected by the conflict. I decided to find interesting overlaps between both our journeys to try and understand the motivations behind his, and in doing so I momentarily stepped into my friend’s shoes. But of course, this isn’t just a project about honoring a slain friend. It’s also about the difficulty of documenting, witness and imagining war.

This is by far the most personal project I’ve produced. Most of the other projects I worked on before this one were projects that I had an interest in or themes that I wanted to understand better, but did not have such a personal element. But as I said, the common denominator between all of them is a desire to rethink the representation of something, whether it be, in this case, conflict or incarceration or death, for example.

What made you apply to the Sony World Photography Awards?

The Sony World Photography Awards have, by far, the most reach out of all the awards I’ve applied or been nominated for to date. You know that the work will be seen worldwide, not just in the country you’re living in. It also has the widest reach in terms of the press, which is quite important if you’re trying to launch a project. Those were the two primary reasons why I entered the awards. It’s important to get to know the structure of the awards, and how it works. Young artists often ask me “how do I choose a project when entering a competition?” – I tell them to pay attention to who the jury is, what their background may be, but more importantly, it’s all about telling stories, telling your story. And there’s a certain skill in that… the edit and the way you describe a project has to be very tight and coherent. That comes with experience. But if you don’t have such experience then I always suggest entering as many awards as one can to perfect the editing process.

The Sony World Photography Awards process is unlike other awards that I’ve been involved in. There’s a genuine interest in wanting to help the artist, in wanting to promote your work, not just during the awards, but also after the awards. The team have always been extremely pleasant and engaged. Overall, the opportunities it provides artists are quite amazing.

When I entered last year, I wasn’t aware that Creo was presenting a solo presentation of the previous Photographer of the Year’s series in the following year’s exhibition. I think this is a great idea because then the public gets to see how a project has developed. So it’s a combination of factors that make the awards an overall great experience. It’s a huge boost for any artist.

“…The potential within photography to disavow your subjects, to unwittingly misrepresent or exploit them is always there, even if you have the best intentions.”

How do you get to know your subjects?

It often takes months. For the first 15 years of my practice I went out of my way not to photograph people. That was partly because of the work itself, which was technology driven, but also due to a concern I’ve always had: the potential within photography to disavow your subjects, to unwittingly misrepresent or exploit them, even if you have the best intentions.

If you look at all my projects pre 2015, you will see that there isn’t one person in the images. But when there are, you don’t see them. For example, I did an interesting project with a very well-known car manufacturer a while back; I was really intrigued by this idea: Can you portray factories in a way that you don’t normally see them? When we think of factories, we think of very busy places open 24/7, 12 months a year, sparks flying everywhere, everything always in motion, production lines working at pace. So I set them a challenge. I said “Can we shut down production in order to photograph the factory?”

I thought that they were going to tell me: “You’re crazy! Who do you think you are? You want to come in here and ask us to shut down production?” But actually, they thought the idea was so intriguing that they obliged. Car factories are busy places with people always moving around. And I was working with long exposures of up to 1 hour, in the instances in which there were people in the spaces, as they were moving around quickly, they don’t actually register in the images.

In fact, most of my images are self-portraits in that respect, in that that I’m in many of those images. I’m usually moving around within the space. For example, if you have an exposure of one hour or two to three hours, I’m often moving in the space lighting elements of it with a hand held flash. So I’m usually in the photographs but you just can’t see me.

But in the last couple of projects I have had to change my approach as the themes dictated it. I have been working on human stories so inevitably I have been photographing people. In this sense, it was absolutely crucial for me to get to know my subjects without picking up a camera. This part of the project took up to a year. I was just engaging with people without photographing them. When it comes to the project I produced with HM Prison Birmingham, I was going into the prison regularly to meet the inmates I wanted to work with, to get to know their families during family days, etc. From the outset I made some decisions that are not common in photography.

If you’re producing a project with a prison about incarceration, the logic would follow that you’d make pictures inside the prison. But I didn’t want to do that because that’s what’s always been done. So I ended up producing the entire project outside the prison walls, visiting the inmates every day but also visiting their families, often bringing their families to the outside perimeter of the prison for photoshoots. So thinking of new ways of telling a story…

In the latest project that I produced in North Africa, which won the Sony World Photography Awards 2023, it was very important for me to find a group of people to follow over a period of three or four years and to only photograph them. So that’s what I focused on. I often like to get to know my subjects really well to the point where we become friends. You establish a deep friendship and connection with the people you’re working with, and that friendship remains after the project. And it’s only then that I feel comfortable in photographing them and that they feel comfortable in being photographed. Also, the equipment I use (large format film cameras) often helps that process.

“Don’t worry about rejection every so often because it’s such a subjective thing.”

What would you say to young people starting out?

Photography is very much a self-structured medium, so you shouldn’t’ have to be reliant on anyone else to do what you want to do. Sure, there are gate keepers, but ultimately making the work is down to you. Also, photography comprises many worlds: editorial, fashion, commercial, artistic, portraiture, corporate. There’s so many versions of photography that you can have very different practices. Although there are crossovers, I’d say focusing on what most interests you is very important.

What I always suggest is to, firstly, experiment as much as you can; not just with the equipment, but get to know the medium creatively, to challenge its boundaries. And be patient with yourself until you develop a language that you’re excited about. Don’t rush things.

From that moment on, be industrious and persistent. Don’t worry about being rejected every so often because it’s such a subjective thing. Winning an award is amazing and it is a great feeling, but you have to be humble about it and realize that it’s always someone’s subjective opinion about your work at that particular time. If you enter the same work a year later, it might not win because there might be another work that resonates more with the jury. Just be very conscious of all of those things. But more importantly, be experimental, industrious, and curious!

“Sometimes … I feel there is a dissonance between the thing itself and potentially how the public sees it.”

We would like to hear your voice, what drives you to creation.

By ‘voice’ I assume you mean one’s artistic instinct, how we respond to the things we’re interested in, the things that move us, that make an impression on us, that make us angry and so on. If I look back at a lot of my projects, my voice has been defined not by a specific way of approaching my subjects or by a specific set of aesthetics, but by curiosity. The curiosity I had for all of those subjects. The intrinsic desire to understand them. More often than not they represented things that I’ve been passionate about or interested in since a very, very young age.

Through photography, and this is possibly the reason why I am a photographic artist and why I have made this my career, I have access to a whole different set of environments that have always interested me. Often environments the public don’t have access to. Let’s say if I was an astronaut or a scientist, or a forensic pathologist, or a criminologist, I would likely have to narrow my research interests. I’m interested in all these areas. I have so many interests that sometimes it’s difficult to contain them.

My voice is guided by the things I feel passionate about, the things I’m curious about … But sometimes I’m also interested in things where I feel there is some cognitive dissonance at play, where I feel there is a discrepancy between the thing itself and how the public sees it.

I often see my role as the mediator between the subject I’m working on and the public. When I worked with the European Space Agency, EDP Power or the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, I felt that my role was that of a conduit between the hidden world of these organizations and the public consciousness. It’s actually one of the reasons why those organizations open their doors to me. They recognized that in my work. So, my role or my voice is that of a mediator, if you like, but also the curious person that wants to break something down. So I think I would define it as that, more than a set of aesthetics or methodologies.

When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at social media and thinking: you people have lost your damn minds. An anodyne photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was issued to the press agencies by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day. First, the amateur sleuths of Twitter spotted some visual inconsistencies in the image. Then the conspiracy theorists came out to play. And before long the major press photo-agencies had withdrawn the photo, with a great show of fastidiousness, from circulation.  

Earnest articles were produced describing it as a watershed moment in the history of the Palace’s relationship with the public; as a catastrophic PR own goal that would take years to recover from. To which the answer is, er… maybe? Given, it isn’t a good look for the Palace to put out a digitally altered photograph without admitting it – though it’s questionable how many photographs reach us unedited anyway, these days, what with the ubiquity of filters and cunning crops and digital blemish removers.  

But the frenzy went much beyond that unexceptionable but dull point. Every pixel of that photograph was parsed for a hidden meaning, either in and of itself (that missing wedding band) or in the meaning of the photo having been altered at all. Was the Princess trying to send the world a message about the state of her marriage? Or was the picture itself fake news – a composite designed to throw the public off the scent that the Princess of Wales was desperately ill, or already dead, or had gone home to the Sunken City of R’lyeh?  

Occam’s razor suggests that the story is much as the Princess has since claimed. She messed around with photo editor, made a hash of it and didn’t tell her press people that’s what she’d done before the shot was released. It’s hard to construct, if we give our heads a bit of a wobble, a non-insane scenario in which anything else is the case. What secret message would someone be trying to send to the world by digitally altering a zip on a jumper, or giving a child one shoe with a stacked heel and another with a flat? 

If the Princess is more unwell than the public has so far been informed, how exactly are the interests of anyone served by pretending she isn’t with a fake photograph – when everything comes out sooner or later and ‘none of your damn business’ is a perfectly respectable position to take? This isn’t the dying days of the Brezhnev era, where the grip of the Party was felt to depend on the health of the leader. The joy of the royal family is that they just aren’t very important; not in that way.   

This real explanation is both very boring, then, and very trivial. But the storm around it – the non-explanations; the ‘explanations’ that made it the centre of a news hurricane – are more telling. We don’t like things to be boring or trivial. We thirst, collectively, for these things to be significant – which is where the solemn pronouncers on Palace spindoctoring, and the news editors who put the story at the very top of the days’ agenda, can find common cause with the bonk-eyed conspiracy nuts. Nothing can just be an unimportant mistake. It is a bellwether of the way we consume news in the digital age: not so much healthily sceptical as feverishly paranoid.  

That’s an old impulse in new form. There’s the same vibe, in the wilder speculation here, of those Beatles fans who imagined that a band would announce the death of their guitarist by having him photographed barefoot on an album cover. But it goes back further than that. Think of the extraordinary grip that the idea of clues baroquely encoded in pictures and texts have always had on our historical imagination: Kabbalah, numerological readings of the Book of Revelations, the Bible Code, the riddling prophecies of Nostradamus… An idea that secret histories are found in codes and riddles hidden in plain sight in canvases by Poussin or Leonardo gives us Umberto Eco at the highbrow end, and Dan Brown or Baigent and Leigh at the lowbrow.  

In our own age, it’s this exact impulse that in supercharged, digitally viral form gives us QAnon – the conspiracy theory which ate all the other conspiracy theories. James Ball’s recent book about the subject makes a compelling case that QAnon isn’t just a marginal collection of cranks, easily to be ignored – but that it is a decisive, and strengthening, force in the affairs of the world. These modes of thinking, these habits of looking at the world, may be bollocks – but they are enduringly attractive, and they have become mainstream.  

In part, it’s because they allow you to conceive of our flat and disenchanted secular world as, once again, radiantly infused with meaning. It is comforting to imagine there’s a secret order behind things, even if it’s a malign one – inasmuch as it prevents you taking on board the alternative, which is that nobody is running things at all, that the world is too vast and too complicated for anything other than footling clashes of ordinary human venality and shortsightedness, cock-ups and dumb luck.   

It’s flattering, too, to think that the evidence for everything is there if you only know how to read it: that for no reason that makes much sense, the conspirators who go to such trouble to hide things from the general public are simultaneously bursting to show you what they’re up to by admitting it in a series of cryptic crossword clues. You might be on the outside: but you’re not fooled, not like those other sheeple. You know how to read the signs. 

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In that sense, your adversaries pay you a degree of respect: those clues are for the special ones, the hermeneutic elect. It’s nicer to imagine that than to admit the alternative, which is that the powerful take no interest in your existence or state of knowledge at all. They have better things to do than lay breadcrumb trails to tease you. If a conspiracy really is going on, the folks at home won’t have the first idea that it is.  

But, in this case, I feel confident in saying that it’s not. The Princess of Wales is a real person, who’s probably having a toughish time, and isn’t all that handy with photoshop. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  

NEWS RELEASE
BROCK UNIVERSITY
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When the total solar eclipse takes place over North America on April 8, many people will naturally reach for their phones or cameras to capture the moment.
Brock Associate Professor of Visual Arts Amy Friend, an internationally recognized photographer, is offering tips on documenting the rare phenomenon safely while also encouraging the public to consider different ways of experiencing what for many will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. 

The chair of visual arts at Brock first points to taking safety precautions for viewing and documenting the eclipse, which can be found on Brock’s Eclipse on the Escarpment web page. Friend says it’s crucial to have a proper solar filter on any camera, including on a smartphone. 

“Solar filters for traditional cameras and cell phones are available online from several retailers, but consumer research is key to ensuring the purchase of an international standard filter (full-aperture and off-axis) with regulated qualities, making it safe for photographing the eclipse,” she says.

According to the award-winning photographer, practice is also key. Practise beforehand by photographing the everyday sun, without looking directly at it, Friend 
says. Taking photos of the sky on a sunny day will help determine appropriate aperture and shutter speed for such bright light. She also suggests getting comfortable with outdoor night photography.

“During totality, when the sun is fully blocked by the moon, turning the sky dark, the camera will need adjusted shutter speeds and aperture settings to take a successful photo,” Friend says.She recommends experimenting with the high dynamic ange (HDR) setting on cameras, which 
captures high-contrast photos. With this setting, many photos of the eclipse could be put together to create one image.

“The visual effect of this is very interesting as the second-to-second variations in the sun flare created by the eclipse combine creating a beautiful image capturing unique details,” Friend says. 

For those looking to get creative, there are other ways to view the solar eclipse, including pinhole projectors or building boxes that filter the sunlight and create a projection of the sunlight onto a nearby surface.

“Using this approach, the person would be looking at the projection instead of the eclipse itself,” Friend says. “What they would see is a darkening circle in the form of a crescent, which is the moon starting to cover the sun.”

While many people will want to capture a photo of the eclipse themselves, photographers throughout history have cautioned against photographing the celestial phenomenon, as it is difficult for the average person to achieve a great photo. 

“We know what it will look like, and yet we still want to photograph it. But we don’t want to miss an incredible experience in the process,” Friend says.

Through her research into the role of photography as proof of experience, however, Friend says the desire to personally capture the moment is very natural.

“There is also the excitement of going online and sharing your photo — the ‘after’ of the experience — that can be quite engaging and stirs up response and dialogue, simultaneously amplifying the experience and documenting it in popular culture,” she says.

Friend is fascinated by historic images of people experiencing celestial events in group settings as a visual time capsule into the culture and technology of the time. 

“I think there is something quite beautiful about that moment, where we all just stop and view something rare and spectacular in the sky together,” she says. “The sun and moon have paused life for a moment.”

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