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

John Schott

John Schott is among the least visible yet most conceptually rigorous of the photographers who participated in the landmark 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Born in 1944, Schott studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later at the Visual Studies Workshop, […]

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

Judith Joy Ross

Judith Joy Ross was born in 1946 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining city in the northeastern part of the state. She has lived and worked in the same region for most of her life, and this rootedness — this commitment to a particular place and its people — is central to understanding her photographic […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Conceptual / Photographer

Karen Knorr

Karen Knorr was born in 1954 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to an American father and a Puerto Rican mother, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, before moving to England in the 1970s. This transnational upbringing gave her an outsider’s perspective on British culture that would prove invaluable when she began photographing the […]

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February 16, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Larry Clark (1943)

Larry Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1943, into a world that would become both the setting and the subject of his most important work. His mother worked as an itinerant baby photographer, travelling from door to door across the state to photograph infants and toddlers for their families. Clark accompanied her from a […]

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February 15, 2026 - American / Photographer / Reflexivity, Home & Family

Larry Sultan (1946 – 2009)

Larry Sultan made his most important work in the place that most artists spend their careers trying to escape: his parents’ house. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Art Institute during the ferment of the […]

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

Lauren Greenfield

Lauren Greenfield was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Angeles, a city whose culture of surfaces, aspiration, and reinvention would become the central subject of her life’s work. Her father was a professor and her mother worked in education, and the family lived in Venice Beach, a neighbourhood where affluence […]

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February 16, 2026 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Lee Friedlander (1934)

Lee Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, a small lumber town on the Pacific Northwest coast that offered little in the way of artistic stimulation but much in the way of American ordinariness. It was precisely this ordinariness, the clutter and texture of everyday life in the United States, that would become his […]

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

Lee Miller

Lee Miller was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of Theodore Miller, an amateur photographer who introduced her to the camera at an early age. Her childhood was marked by a traumatic assault at the age of seven, an event whose long shadow would be felt throughout her life. She […]

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

Leonard Freed

Leonard Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. He grew up in a working-class neighbourhood where questions of identity, belonging, and social justice were not abstract concepts but the texture of daily life. After graduating from high school, he initially […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / New Topographical / Photographer

Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz was born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, at a moment when Southern California was beginning the explosive postwar development that would transform its landscape from agricultural land and open desert into an endless expanse of tract housing, shopping centres, freeways, and industrial parks. He grew up watching this transformation firsthand, and the […]

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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.