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

David Alan Harvey

David Alan Harvey was born in 1944 in San Francisco and grew up in Virginia, where his photographic life began remarkably early. At the age of eleven, he received a camera from his father and almost immediately began a long-term documentary project photographing an African American family in Norfolk, Virginia. This body of work, eventually […]

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February 15, 2026 - American / Family of Man / Photographer / Social - Street

Diane Arbus (1923 -1971)

Diane Arbus changed the possibilities of the photographic portrait forever. Born Diane Nemerov in 1923 to a wealthy Jewish family that owned Russeks, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store, she grew up insulated from the rougher textures of American life. That insulation became, paradoxically, the engine of her art. From an early age she felt […]

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

Dirck Halstead

Dirck Halstead was born in 1936 in Huntington, New York, and began his photographic career at an astonishingly young age. At fifteen, he was already selling photographs to local newspapers, and by the time he was seventeen, he had talked his way into covering the Guatemalan revolution of 1954 for United Press International, becoming one […]

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

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]

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

Doug DuBois

Doug DuBois is an American photographer whose practice is defined by the depth and duration of his engagement with his subjects. Where many photographers pass through communities, extracting images and moving on, DuBois commits to relationships that extend over years, sometimes decades, building a body of work that earns its intimacy through sustained presence and […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Conceptual / Photographer

Duane Michals

Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Conceptual / Photographer

Ed Ruscha

Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]

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

Edward Steichen

Edward Jean Steichen was born in 1879 in the village of Bivange, Luxembourg, and emigrated with his family to the United States as an infant, settling in Hancock, Michigan, before the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother encouraged his artistic inclinations, and by the age of fifteen he had begun a four-year apprenticeship at […]

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

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston was born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb north of Chicago. His father gave him his first camera at the age of sixteen, and the young Weston took to photography with an immediate and consuming passion. He briefly attended the Illinois College of Photography before moving to California in […]

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

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt was born Elio Romano Erwitz in Paris in 1928 to Russian Jewish émigré parents. His early childhood was spent in Milan, Italy, before his family emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling first in New York and then in Los Angeles. It was in Hollywood, of all places, that the young Erwitt […]

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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.