Brad Zellar | Till the Wheels Fall Off

Author, editor, and photo collaborator Brad Zellar joined me at the 2025 Chico Review to talk about his life as a writer, including his work with Alec Soth and Little Brown Mushroom, and his novel, Till the Wheels Fall Off (Coffee House Press). We discussed Brad’s love of photography and how Chico and Montana have become a second home for him. Brad also shared how his early struggles with addiction and an unintentional photography grant helped him to refocus on his writing and clarify his relationship to photography. (Cover photo: Eric Ruby)

https://www.instagram.com/bradzellar/ ||| https://coffeehousepress.org/products/till-the-wheels-fall-off

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club Begin Building your dream photobook library today at https://charcoalbookclub.com ||| https://www.chicoreview.com

Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for regional and national magazines. A former senior editor at City Pages, The Rake, and Utne Reader, Zellar is also the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, Conductors of the Moving World, House of Coates, and Driftless. He has frequently collaborated with the photographer Alec Soth, and together they produced seven editions of The LBM Dispatch, chronicling American community life in the twenty-first century. Zellar’s work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Paris Review, Vice, Guernica, Aperture, and Russian Esquire. He spent fifteen years working in bookstores and was a co-owner of Rag & Bone Books in Minneapolis. He currently lives in Saint Paul.

Agnieszka Sosnowska | Bryan Schutmaat | FÖR

Bryan Schutmaat and Agnieszka Sosnowska join me today to talk about the process of publishing Agnieszka’s monograph, FÖR (Trespasser). Agnieszka shares her journey from Poland to Boston to Iceland, and how she considers herself a teacher and a provider before thinking of herself as a photographer. Bryan and Agnieszka detail their time together looking at the work, along with Trespasser’s co-founder Matthew Genitempo, and the book was later designed by Trespasser’s designer, Cody Haltom. We also have a wide ranging conversation about the legacy implications of publishing your work, the differences in editing color photography, and the importance of being a smaller imprint.

https://www.sosphotographs.com |||
https://www.bryanschutmaat.co |||
https://trespasser.co/shop/for

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club Begin Building your dream photobook library today at https://charcoalbookclub.com

Agnieszka Sosnowska was born in Warsaw, Poland and was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a MFA from Boston University. She is currently an elementary school teacher. She lives on farm in East Iceland. Sosnowska has been the recipient of a number of grants, including a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to Poland and an American Scandinavian Fellowship to Iceland. She was awarded the Hjálmar R. Bárðarson Photography Grant awarded by the National Museum of Iceland. Her series was awarded the Director’s Choice by the Center awards in 2017 and she has been in the Top 50 of Critical Mass on 3 occasions. Her work has been exhibited in the National Museum of Iceland and The Reykjavik Museum of Photography. Sosnowska's monograph, FÖR (Trespasser) was published in 2024.

Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He co-founded the imprint, Trespasser.

Jake Benzinger (Wych Elm) and Tabitha Barnard join me to officially launch my series on publishers and authors where I explore the relationship that builds between publishers, editors, designers, and photographers and to hopefully provide some insight as to how photobooks are being made. Tabitha’s book, Dead Trees Speak to Me, was Jake’s first photo book that was not his own and Jake and Tabitha will share how they came to know each other and why Jake wanted to publish Tabitha’s work. We will talk about the editing and sequencing of the book as well as some of the more traditional questions about how they both got to where they are.

https://wychelm.press ||| https://jakebenzinger.com ||| https://www.tabithabarnard.com

This podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club Begin Building your dream photobook library today at https://charcoalbookclub.com

Tabitha Barnard was born in Freedom, New Hampshire in 1994. She is a photographer who grew up in rural Maine with three sisters. Growing up in a very Christian female-dominated family has had a huge influence on her work. Barnard works primarily in digital color photography exploring themes of femininity and religion. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from Maine College of Art in the Spring of 2016 and a Master of Fine Art from Massachusetts College of Art in the Spring of 2021. She has worked in both commercial studio settings, as a shooting assistant, and as the media technician for the photo department at the Maine College of Art. She currently works in Portland Maine, teaching at the Maine College of Art and the University of Southern Maine.

Jake Benzinger (he/him) is a photographer, book artist, and writer based in Rockland, Maine; he received his BFA in photography from Lesley University, College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA. His work has been shown nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Haute Photographie Rotterdam, Center for Fine Art Photography, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, 82Parris, Panopticon Gallery, RIT City Space Gallery, and more. He has been featured by numerous platforms including GUP Magazine, Lensculture, Float Magazine, Lenscratch, Transference Magazine, and Fraction Magazine. His publications are held in collections at the National Gallery of Art, School of Visual Arts, SMFA at Tufts, and Griffin Museum of Photography, and his monograph, Like Dust Settling in a Dim-Lit Room (Or Starless Forest), was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucie Photobook Prize.