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

Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham and grew up in a council tower block in the Cradley Heath area of the Black Country, in the industrial West Midlands. His father, Ray, was an alcoholic who brewed his own drink and spent most of his time confined to the flat. His mother, Liz, was […]

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

Shirley Baker

Shirley Baker was born in Salford in 1932, the daughter of a factory worker in one of the great industrial cities of northern England. She grew up in the terraced streets and back-to-back houses that would later become the central subjects of her photographic work, and she never lost the intimate knowledge of working-class life […]

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

Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971 and grew up in the west of England before moving to London, where he would spend nearly two decades engaged in one of the most sustained and inventive photographic explorations of a single place that contemporary photography has produced. Gill’s early interest in photography was shaped by […]

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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 17, 2026 - British / Photographer / Social - Street

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1965, and grew up in a family that valued the arts without being part of the art world. She studied at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she began to develop the practice that […]

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March 4, 2026 - British / Fashion / Photographer / Portrait / Terrible Three

Terence Donovan

One of the legendary “Terrible Three” who revolutionised British fashion photography, Donovan brought cinematic drama, muscular energy, and a raw East End swagger to the studio.

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

The Photograph as Contemporary Art – Charlotte Cotton

  From Amazon:  This book, now updated and expanded, is a profusely illustrated survey of the use of photography in contemporary art since the mid-1980s. It features the work of more than 170 of internationally renowned and up-and-coming artist-photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Richard Billingham, Jürgen Teller, Thomas Demand, Christopher Williams, Sherrie […]

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February 18, 2026 - British / Great Text Book / Writer

The Pleasures of Good Photographs – Gerry Badger

  Review by Aperture:   The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the field’s eminent critics and popular writers and the author of more than a dozen books including both volumes of The Photobook: A History. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some […]

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

Tony Ray-Jones

Tony Ray-Jones was born Holroyd Antony Ray-Jones in 1941 in Wells, Somerset, and grew up in the small-town England that would become his greatest subject. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing before winning a scholarship to Yale University in 1961, where he studied under the legendary graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch and […]

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

Ways of Seeing – John Berger

From Amazon: Based on the BBC television series, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.’ ‘But there is also another sense […]

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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.