To celebrate 20 years of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits standout moments from past conversations with photographers Catherine Opie, Albert Watson, Pete Souza, Lynn Goldsmith, and Mary Ellen Matthews. These excerpts explore how they approach craft, capture truth, and use the camera to tell the stories that define us.

Pete Souza:As a photojournalist, you always hope to have a subject like that.

Albert Watson:I’m always ready for a surprise, something that doesn’t work.

Curtis Fox:From a TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the photographers Debbie has interviewed over the years.

Catherine Opie:I wish everybody had that education in some ways.

Mary Ellen Matthews:I had to leave because I wasn’t really doing my job.

Debbie Millman:Susan Sontag once wrote, “To photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves.” She went on to say, “Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun. To photograph someone, a subliminal murder.” Very dramatic. I’m not so sure about that.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve interviewed some of the most celebrated photographers of our time, and they all happen to be very nice, very interesting people, not a murderer among them. On this episode, I want to play some excerpts from several of those interviews. Catherine Opie’s portraits of queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco brought her fame and recognition in the 1990s. When I interviewed her in 2021, I wanted to get into those early days of her career.

You began to contribute photographs to lesbian magazines you mentioned on our backs, whose name was a response to the anti-pornography feminist journal off our backs.

Debbie Millman:How did you first discover the magazine?