February 23, 2026 - French / Great Text Book / Writer

The Mind’s Eye – Henri Cartier-Bresson

 From Amazon: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s writings on photography and photographers have been published sporadically over the past 45 years. His essays―several of which have never before been translated into English―are collected here for the first time. The Mind’s Eye features Cartier-Bresson’s famous text on “the decisive moment” as well as his observations on Moscow, Cuba and China […]

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February 23, 2026 - All nationalities / British / Great Text Book / Writer

Street Photography Now – Sophie Howarth & Stephen McLaren

  From Amazon The definitive anthology of contemporary street photography across the globe Get up close and personal with the world’s best street photographers as they capture the drama of everyday life at 1/125 of a second. Rub shoulders with high-rollers, street vendors and dog walkers. Prowl sidewalks and back alleys, encountering comic absurdities, small […]

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February 23, 2026 - Great Text Book / Italian / Writer

Photoshow- Landmark Exhibitions –  Alessandra Mauro

  From Amazon: From photography’s earliest days, the thrill and immediacy of the new medium were defined at the first public exhibitions. Half art, half science, photography captured the attention of everyone from eager technophiles to curious painters: the art of representation was about to change. This is the first book to study the history of photography […]

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February 23, 2026 - British / Great Text Book / Writer

Photography Today – Mark Durden

 From Amazon: A lively and accessible survey of photography as art since the 1960s, exploring how, in the hands of some of the world’s greatest photographic artists, it has developed into a respected and versatile artistic med

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February 23, 2026 - American / Great Text Book / Writer

Photography Changes Everything – Marvin Heiferman

 From Amazon: Photography Changes Everythingdrawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative offers a provocative rethinking of photography’s impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. At this transitional moment […]

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February 23, 2026 - American / Great Text Book / Writer

New Documents, 1967 – Sarah Hermanson Meister

 From Amazon: In 1967, The Museum of Modern Art presented New Documents, a landmark exhibition organized by John Szarkowski that brought together a selection of works by three photographers whose individual achievements signalled the artistic potential for the medium in the 1960s and beyond: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Though largely unknown at the […]

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February 23, 2026 - American / Curator / Great Text Book / Writer

The Photographers Eye – John Szarkowski

 From Amazon: The Photographer’s Eye, available again after some years out of print, offers a guide to the medium’s visual language through works by such early masters as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Strand and Weston. In this re-issue, 172 illustrations reveal the extraordinary range of the photograph from the early days of the medium’s development to the […]

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February 23, 2026 - American / Curator / Great Text Book / Writer

Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 – John Szarkowski

 Whe whole book is available on the MOMA web site here:  https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2347_300062558.pdf NOTES: The following handwritten notes are from my MFA research notebook. This book was one of my favourite sources. The handwriting is almost illegible and the spelling worse!  

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February 23, 2026 - American / Curator / Great Text Book / Writer

Looking at Photographs – John Szarkowski

 From Amazon:  ‘This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation’, wrote curator John Szarkowski in this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art’s photography collection. Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for […]

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February 23, 2026 - American / Great Text Book / Writer

Inverted Odysseys – Shelley Rice

 From Amazon: An “odyssey” through historical, theoretical, critical, and literary perspectives on the three artists. Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman were born in different countries, in different generations; Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954. Yet they share a deeply theatrical obsession that […]

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RESOURCES

This is where I keep the research — over 200 studies of the photographers, writers, curators and exhibitions I’ve found most compelling. Each entry offers a summary of their practice together with a few examples of their work, where copyright permits.

FOCUS


Browse by genre (use the hamburger menu above on mobile) — Street, Fashion, Landscape, Documentary and others. Most of these categories took shape during my MFA studies and many of the people here appear in multiple categories.

NATIONALITIES

View landmark exhibitions like New Topographics and The Family of Man alongside individual studies of Magnum photographers and many others, like the "Terrible Three", who have shaped the way we see.