Work placement – Dewi Lewis interview

For the second interview in my series for Photo Meet, I interviewed the photo book publisher Dewi Lewis. Was fortunate enough to spend a few days with Dewi last year during a workshop. He was very complimentary about my book 100 Women, 100 Years, which I showed to him as part of a portfolio review.

This meant that I felt able to approach him to ask for an interview and I am pleased to say that he agreed. As with the procedure I established in my previous interview with Tracy Marshall, I interviewed Dewi via Zoom, recording the session and transcribing it later. I sent this text to him for approval and he returned a clarified and expanded version with the benefit of hindsight.

Not having the benefit of any training in journalism, I am approaching these interviews as essentially a conversation. I have a list of prepared questions as a starting point, but I let the conversation develop as we talk. I asked Dewi fro an hour of his time but in the end we talked for two and a half hours.

Although it may seem obvious, one thing I am conscious of is that not everything said in conversation can be included in a published interview. There are also differences in tone between the spoken word and the written word, so in transcribing the interview I try to steer a line between accuracy and adulting to the slight more formal language of a written text. For these reasons I prefer to get the final text approved and adjusted if necessary by the interviewee before publishing. These interviews are a collaboration, not investigative journalism.

The interview can be seen online here:

https://photomeet.org/dewi-lewis-interview

and in PDF form here:

I was pleased to see that Dewi wrote about the experience of the interview on his blog:

https://www.dewilewis.com/blogs/news/looking-back-003-martin-parr-the-last-resort