February 12, 2026 - American / New Topographical / Photographer

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore arrived at photography with the certainty of a prodigy and the curiosity of a born observer. Born in New York City in 1947, he received his first darkroom kit at the age of six and began teaching himself the craft that would define his life’s work. By the time he was ten, a […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Magnum / Photographer / War - Conflict

Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of the city. He studied film and history at Pennsylvania State University, where he also began working for the student newspaper and discovered a passion for visual storytelling. After graduating, he worked briefly at a newspaper before deciding to pursue […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Susan Lipper

Susan Lipper was born in New York in 1953 and came to photography after studying at Yale University, where she completed an MFA under the guidance of Tod Papageorge. Her education at Yale placed her within one of the most rigorous programmes in American photography, but her work would develop in directions that departed significantly […]

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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 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Thomas Joshua Cooper

Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco in 1946 and raised in the American West, where the vast landscapes of California and the desert Southwest formed the earliest coordinates of his visual imagination. He studied at Humboldt State College in Northern California before undertaking graduate work at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, […]

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February 20, 2026 - American / Photographer / Portrait / Reflexivity, Home & Family

Tina Barney

Tina Barney was born in 1945 into the rarefied world of New York’s social elite. She grew up on the Upper East Side and spent summers in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and Sun Valley, Idaho. She came to photography relatively late, studying at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in the mid-1970s and then […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Todd Hido

Todd Hido was born in 1968 in Kent, Ohio, a small Midwestern town whose quiet streets, modest houses, and overcast skies would become the emotional landscape of his entire body of work. He grew up in a turbulent household, and the tensions of his childhood — the gap between the orderly exterior of suburban life […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Landscape - Cityscape / Photographer / Social - Street

Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier is the most remarkable photographic discovery of the twenty-first century. Born in New York City in 1926 to a French mother and an Austrian father, she spent significant portions of her childhood in the village of Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur in the French Alps, where her mother had family connections. This Franco-American upbringing gave her a […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Family of Man / Magnum / Photographer / Social - Street

W. Eugene Smith

William Eugene Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1918, and from his earliest years demonstrated an intensity of purpose that would define both the brilliance and the turbulence of his life. His father, a grain dealer, committed suicide when Eugene was eighteen, a trauma that left a lasting mark on the young man. Smith […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, the son of an advertising director whose restless ambitions kept the family moving through the Midwest. He grew up in suburban Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, attending a series of preparatory schools before enrolling at Williams College in Massachusetts. He was a voracious reader but a […]

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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.