In the image: Heather Stewart-Whyte
Article by Christina Vaughan, 6th November 2026
The photograph accompanying this article captures something I have always admired about Heather Stewart-Whyte: a beauty that feels timeless. It is an image designed to make you stop and look. For me, it also brings back the experience of seeing her in magazines long before we knew one another.
I could never have imagined then that, more than three decades later, we would be sitting together making a podcast.
There is something wonderful about getting to know a person whose face you recognised long before you heard their stories. A photograph can hold your attention for years. A conversation can change what you see in it.
That has become one of the unexpected pleasures of making The Image Makers.
Speaking on BBC Radio Sheffield recently, our fellow host Stephen Mayes made an observation that stopped me in my tracks: radio should perhaps be considered the most visual medium of all, because it asks us to use our imagination.
It stayed with me. Three people whose working lives have revolved around images are discovering what happens when we give more space to sound.
Three perspectives, shared curiosity
With The Image Makers, we wanted to explore the influence pictures have on our lives. What I hadn’t anticipated was how much the process would teach us about one another—and ourselves.
Heather brings the experience of an international modelling career, and a particular understanding of being both a person and an image. Stephen’s career spans photography and the leadership of major image organisations. My own has involved more than thirty years in the international business of images.
We share an appreciation of the worlds we have navigated, but we have occupied very different positions within them.
For Heather, a photograph might begin with the experience of standing in front of the camera. Stephen might ask what the photographer saw, what an editor selected and what an audience understands. I might think about how the image travels, who licenses it, what gives it value and whose lives it represents.
Put those perspectives together and a deceptively simple question opens up: who actually makes an image—the person taking it, the person appearing in it, the people putting it into circulation, or all of us who give it meaning?
Our conversations move between those experiences. They overlap, challenge one another and take us somewhere none of us expected.
That is becoming my favourite part.
The courage to be beginners
We are four episodes into releasing The Image Makers, and it has been a huge learning experience.
Knowing your subject does not mean you immediately know how to make a podcast. You have to discover the pace of a conversation, when to pursue a thought and when to leave enough room for someone else to develop theirs.
Our first episode felt a little like a date arranged by a mutual friend who was convinced you would get on. The connection was there, alongside the occasional pause, the eagerness to fill a silence and the thought you returned to because you hadn’t quite finished with it.
By the third and fourth recordings, I could feel a growing ease. We were becoming more confident about following an unexpected thread, asking a more personal question or staying with a difference of opinion.
There is pleasure in allowing yourself to be a beginner again. Experience gives you something to contribute; curiosity gives you a reason to keep listening.
And listening changes relationships. Knowing someone professionally is one thing. Thinking you know them personally is another. Hearing the memory behind an opinion, or discovering why a subject matters deeply to them, takes you somewhere else.
A question about photography becomes a conversation about identity, beauty, ambition or belonging. A recollection changes your understanding of something you thought you knew.
A programme exploring how we see people is helping its hosts see one another more fully.
The pictures we carry in our heads
Stephen’s observation about radio captures what appeals to me about listening.
A voice can conjure a person, a place or a moment. The listener supplies the pictures, drawing on their own memories and imagination. We can hear the same story and each see something different.
Although The Image Makers is also available on YouTube, I love that intimacy of sound.
I listened to our first episode while stuck in traffic, already late for an industry dinner ahead of the Northern Tech Summit in Sheffield. With nowhere to go and the car barely moving, I found myself listening closely.
Something surprising happened. Although I had been part of the recording, I began to feel like a listener invited into a conversation with three people who interested me. I heard things differently from how I remembered them in the room.
It made me appreciate how much a conversation continues to offer after the moment in which it happens.
Why these conversations matter
You don’t need a background in photography to have a stake in these questions.
Images help establish our ideas of beauty and success. They shape who feels visible and who feels overlooked. They preserve family memories, sell us aspirations and influence what we believe about people we have never met.
We participate every time we choose a photograph to share or decide how we want to appear to the world.
That raises questions worth asking at any age: whose approval are we seeking? What does a photograph leave out? When we compare our everyday lives with someone else’s carefully selected moments, what are we really comparing?
Heather’s experience brings a particular depth to conversations about beauty and being seen. Having admired her photographs for years, I now have the privilege of hearing the experience behind them. Her warmth, humour and perspective become part of my understanding of images I once knew only from a page.
AI adds further questions. When a convincing picture can be generated, what do we expect it to tell us? Who deserves recognition and payment? Whose faces and experiences shape the visual world—and who gets to decide how they are used?
These questions are part of my working life at Cultura Creative. Exploring them with Heather and Stephen brings different experiences and assumptions into the conversation. It also reminds me how much there is still to ask.
Finding our rhythm
We have been so encouraged by the coverage and interaction around our opening episodes. Some of the most rewarding moments, though, have happened between the three of us: unexpected connections, revealing admissions and thoughts I have carried away and reconsidered afterwards.
At times, the conversations have felt surprisingly therapeutic. Saying something aloud, and hearing how someone else responds, can help you understand your own experience differently.
We hoped the chemistry and warmth would come through. What I hadn’t anticipated was the depth of common ground, or the affection that would grow through making something new together.
Podcasting has given us room to follow a thought beyond its first answer. To remember, question, laugh and occasionally reconsider. We are finding our rhythm, and I hope listeners will enjoy getting to know us as we continue getting to know one another.
The photograph of Heather still stops me in my tracks. Now I look at it with the added pleasure of knowing the voice, the stories and the friend behind that beautiful face.
After years working with pictures, it turns out there is a great deal we can learn by listening.
The Image Makers is hosted by Christina Vaughan, Heather Stewart-Whyte and Stephen Mayes, and produced by Loadout Media. Four episodes are now available on YouTube and major podcast platforms, with new episodes released weekly.
Christina Vaughan
Cultura Creative Founder and co-host of The Image Makers
6th November 2026