February 17, 2026 - American / New Topographical / Photographer

Henry Wessel

Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up on the suburban East Coast before the landscape of the American West would claim him entirely. He studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 under […]

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

Irving Penn

Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, the elder of two sons in a family of modest means. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, but it was Irving who first found his way into the visual arts. As a teenager he discovered […]

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

Jeff Mermelstein

Jeff Mermelstein was born in 1957 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and has spent the better part of four decades walking the streets of New York City with a camera, producing a body of work that ranks among the sharpest and most witty contributions to the American street photography tradition. He studied at the School […]

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

Jim Goldberg

Jim Goldberg was born in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent his career developing a form of documentary photography that is at once deeply personal and rigorously engaged with questions of social justice, power, and representation. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his MFA, and it was in […]

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

Joe Deal

Joe Deal was born in 1947 in Topeka, Kansas, and grew up in the heartland of a country that was rapidly transforming itself. After studying painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, he turned to photography, earning his BFA in 1970 and subsequently pursuing graduate work at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque under […]

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

Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz was born in 1938 in the Bronx, New York, into a working-class family whose world revolved around the dense, teeming streets of the city. He studied painting and medical illustration at Ohio State University, disciplines that sharpened his eye for form, anatomy, and the precise observation of detail. Yet it was not in […]

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

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld was born in 1944 in New York City and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He studied painting at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1965, and it was during his undergraduate years that he began to experiment with photography. His early interest in the medium was shaped less by the prevailing […]

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

John Baldessari

John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border just south of San Diego. His father was a salvage dealer who had emigrated from Austria, and his mother was Danish. It was not a background that naturally led to the art world, and Baldessari’s path to becoming […]

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

John Gossage

John Gossage was born in 1946 in New York City but has spent most of his working life in Washington, D.C., a city whose margins, neglected spaces, and transitional zones have provided the primary subject matter for one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary photography. He came to the medium young, studying […]

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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.