Real Photo Show with Michael Chovan-Dalton

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Writer and artist Donna Gordon joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about her series that reimagines Eve in the Garden.

Donna Gordon is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based writer and artist. She graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a PEN Discovery, and a Ploughshares Discovery. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, Regal House 2022, received a starred review from Kirkus Review and was named among the 100 best Indie novels of 2023, having been described as, “A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.” The novel also received the 2022 Whirling Prose Prize from Etchings Press, and was the November pick for the Brown Book Club of Boston. It was named by the Independent Book Review as one of the top 45 they’re excited about for 2022. Nina McLaughlin wrote in a Boston Globe review: “Gordon’s prose is lively; it rushes along with verve, humor, and heart…[She has] achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death and love and a page-turning adventure.” She received the 2018 New Letters Publication Award for her short story, “Primates,” and has published fiction, poetry, and essays nationally.

Gordon is also a visual artist, with a focus on photography and printmaking. She received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice award for a portrait, and was finalist for portrait series. She received the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, winner in portrait series and alternative process, and honorable mention for women seen by women and landscape series. Her work has been featured in both Shots Magazine and The Hand and has been shown in both solo and group shows at the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, ArtsWorcester, Providence Art Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Galatea Fine Art, Concord Art Association, George Marshall Store Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Featherstone Gallery, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Attleboro Art Museum, and Cambridge Art Association. Her work with former political prisoners culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. She’s represented by Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

https://donnasgordon.com
https://www.instagram.com/donnagordon8994/

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

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com
https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Stuart Thurlkill joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about his photographs of a famous river corridor in Montana. Thurlkill also has some great insight into how the photo review process can be most beneficial.

Stuart Thurlkill’s work exists at the intersection of observation and intuition. An award-winning filmmaker and photographer, he does not merely capture a subject; he unearths the quiet dialogue between heart and head. His documentary roots provide a foundation of truth, yet his lens often seeks the shadows where nature, community and industry converge in unexpected ways. Whether freezing a fleeting moment in the wild or the stillness of a portrait, Thurlkill invites us to witness the world as it is felt, a lingering presence in a restless world.

https://www.stuartthurlkill.com
https://www.instagram.com/stuartthurlkill/

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

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com
https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Chris Muth joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about his landscape work and processing the varying critiques he received.

My name is Chris Muth. I have been a photographer for over 12 years, exploring many different styles and disciplines within the medium, as you may be able to tell. I received my education in filmmaking, and have been photographing, originally, as a way to practice cinematography without a crew and equipment. It has now taken over my creative interest, really since I went to college.

For the past few years, I have focused on the land around me, trying to find something within it that I cannot find through other photographic work about the subject. I have been working on a project titled Everywhere You Have Ever Been for about 5 years now, and am going to complete it before this next spring. This project is concerned with exploring our connection to the natural world by exploring the hostility between us. This website will serve as a constantly evolving catalog of that project, as well as a showcase of my previous commercial and creative work.

Feel free to contact me for any freelance opportunities, I am open for business! I would love to assist on any projects, and help support a vision!

Contact: chrismuthvisuals@gmail.com

https://www.chrismuthphoto.com
https://www.instagram.com/sirhchtum/

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

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com
https://www.charcoalworkshops.com

JOHN BAER: THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY / A MEMOIR IN PHOTOGRAPHS 1945–1954

Andrew Baer and Megan Moynihan join Michael Chovan-Dalton to celebrate the release of John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary / A Memoir in Photographs 1945-1954, A Paper Cinema Edition, published by the John Baer Archive. This is, true to its title, an extraordinary collection of the never before published life work of John Baer, Andrew Baer's father. It's also a conversation about how wonderful a collaboration can be between family and professionals such as famed designer Yolanda Cuomo and her team, Alexa Dilworth and Jonno Rattman, Steve Smith at RISD, and Eric Luden at Digital Silver Imaging, who all believe in the work.

https://www.johnbaerarchive.com
https://www.instagram.com/johnbaerarchive/
https://www.instagram.com/yolandacuomodesign/

JOHN BAER (1920-1994)

In 1945, while serving in the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, John Baer acquired a Leica camera from a captured German soldier. His first photographs were of his fellow soldiers, weary from war.

Soon after the war John and his wife Louise moved to New York City, rented an apartment in the East Village, and connected with a community of artists and writers.

In 1950 they journeyed to France and spent the next year living in Montpellier and traveling throughout Postwar Europe. John’s photographs capture a world struggling to understand itself following years of war and political realignment.

In 1951 John and Louise returned to New York and their apartment in the East Village. John walked the streets, taking pictures that provide glimpses of ordinary people in the unguarded moments of their lives—at work, at rest, at play. He developed negatives and made prints in a make-shift darkroom in the bathroom of their fifth floor walk-up.

Sometime in the mid-1950s, John stowed his photographic life away. After his death, in 1994, his son Andrew found boxes containing thousands of negatives and prints from between 1945 and 1954. For 27 years the boxes moved whenever Andrew did. Finally, in 2021, Andrew and his wife Megan Moynihan dove into the boxes to see what stories they held. Stories of Europe emerging from the darkness of war. Stories of New York City brimming with the optimism of the early 1950s. Stories of a generation and stories of John Baer, seen through the lens of his Leica.

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

2026 Chico Attendees Series

Photographer Katerina Kouzmitcheva joins Michael Chovan-Dalton from the 2026 Chico Review to talk about her work, Butter Melts at 36.6°C, which weaves together political, social, and psychological ideas that create a portrait of her life and the lives of the people she encounters.

https://katerinakouzmitcheva.com
https://www.instagram.com/katerina_kouzmitcheva/

Katerina Kouzmitcheva is a Polish photographer of Belarusian origin based in Wrocław, Poland. Working at the intersection of documentary and art photography, she explores how visible and invisible boundaries—geographical, ideological, and psychological—shape individual lives and collective attitudes. Her work focuses on migration, systems of control, memory, gender, and identity, while also turning inward—to vulnerability, femininity, and the emotional experience of loss—moving between the personal and the political.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Law, graduated from the Academy of Documentary and Art Photography “Fotografika” in St. Petersburg, and earned both her Master’s and PhD degrees in Fine Arts from the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. She is currently continuing her studies at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic.

She is a winner of international photography competitions including TIFA, BIFA, and the Urbanautica Institute Awards, and a recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Katerina is a member of the international photojournalist collective Women Photograph. Her work has been exhibited in Arles, as well as in Brazil, Japan, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Her photography has been featured in publications including British Journal of Photography, Bird in Flight, Monovisions, and Dodho, among others.

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

The Chico Review is the country’s premier Photobook Retreat. Organized by Charcoal Book Club, The Chico Review takes place over six nights at Chico Hot Springs Resort, near Livingston Montana. Applicants will spend the week with over twenty of the most influential and creative photographers, book makers, gallerists, museum curators, and photobook publishers in the industry.

https://chicoreview.com
https://www.charcoalworkshops.com