Max Ferguson
Photography Editor, Granta magazine
Combining words and images has always fascinated me. I like to think of it as symbiosis – the coexistence of two organisms that typically benefits both. As the photo editor at Granta I come up with ideas for photoessays and think about how images sit alongside the writing. Beyond Granta I also lecture in photography and am the founding editor of a small photography magazine called Splash & Grab. A book I can’t help but recommend to people is J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine. For almost a decade Baker tracked peregrine falcons across the Essex countryside and his diaristic writing is strangely addictive. I’m a photographer as well as a photo editor, and spend a lot of time in the countryside making images about memories. Another fan of memory was W. G. Sebald and I love all of his writing. Austerlitz, translated from Sebald’s mesmerising antiquated German, is the one I reread most. The copy of Granta I keep returning to is a recent one – Issue 152: Still Life – published last summer. Diana Matar and Teju Cole’s photographs are featured in this issue, and they are two people who have influenced my own thinking about photography.
