Your Story Isn’t Needed - Pie Aerts Finds Meaning Within The Pressure Machine Of Photography, E108
2/4/20261 hr 38 min
In this episode, I sit down with photographer Pie Aerts to unpack the philosophies, struggles, and decisions that have shaped his work over the last decade. Pie is a documentary and wildlife photographer whose practice sits at the intersection of human presence, conservation, and long-form storytelling. He is also the founder of Prints for Wildlife, a platform that has raised over $2.5 million for conservation initiatives worldwide.
Our conversation focuses on how Pie thinks about photography beyond aesthetics. We talk about self-doubt, ethics, money, responsibility, and what it actually takes to stay committed to a story...
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPie Aerts· Soundbite0:00
This is a tricky, tricky subject to speak about, but what, like, what, why am I doing this? Self-doubt is the one thing you need to embrace as an artist.
Matt Jacob· Host0:09
How do you sit with this kind of moral tension after be- doing it for so many years and these ethical responsibilities of, that you have- I'm having a hard time in defining what type of photographer I am.
Pie Aerts· Soundbite0:20
But in the end of the day, one recurring thread is I'm always looking for an angle of hope, and it's the one thing I'm missing in an attempt to try to explain why we seem increasingly disconnected, not only from each other, but also from ourselves, and mostly also from our environment.
Matt Jacob· Host0:37
Let's go into what we really wanna talk about. You know, you, you mentioned it, your project down in Chile.
Pie Aerts· Soundbite0:42
That quest brought me to the Chilean region of Magallanes in the south of Patagonia for the first time in 2019. It was on that journey where I was first drawn to the quiet, solitary existence of Chilean Puesteros.
Matt Jacob· Host0:56
How do you approach a culture and a subculture and a, a cohort of people that don't want to be photographed?
Pie Aerts· Soundbite1:03
At first instance, it felt like I was doing a story on the duality of isolation, which is partly it's still about that. On the one hand, you can see these guys battling with the mental consequences of living an entire life in isolation. They might be forever solidified as the last generation of this culture. They fear retiring more than they fear dying. A story I'll never forget is-