012 - Abbie Trayler Smith

Abbie Trayler Smith was born and raised in Wales. Her career in photography began in London where she found herself studying for a degree in law, before realising that a legal career in the UK would almost certainly look nothing like it did on Ally McBeal. At around the same time she discovered and fell in love with documentary photography and so that is what she decided to pursue. Her first professional experience was as a news photographer for the Daily Telegraph, where she spent eight years covering world events such as the Darfur conflict, the Iraq war and the Asian tsunami, before deciding to go freelance in 2007. She now works for a wide variety of clients including Time, The Sunday Times, The Independent Review, Marie-Claire, Tatler, Monocle, Vice and a number of NGOs. In 2008 she joined photo agency Panos Pictures. In 2014, she won a second prize in the World Press Photo awards for a portrait from her long-term personal project The Big ‘O’, which focusses on what has become one of the huge global health issues of our times, that of childhood obesity. The project, which is still ongoing, also won the 2014 Ideastap Magnum Photographic Award. In episode 012, Abbie discusses: Multi-media; seeing Philip Jones Griffiths' contact sheets; why she eschewed a legal career; her eight years with the Daily Telegraph; The Big 'O' project and the Still Human, Still Here project.