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

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky was born on January 15, 1955, in Leipzig, in what was then East Germany, into a family of commercial photographers. His father, Willy Gursky, ran a successful advertising photography studio, and the young Andreas grew up surrounded by the tools and processes of the medium. The family moved to West Germany during his […]

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

Andreas Weinand

Andreas Weinand is a German documentary photographer based in Cologne whose work occupies a distinctive position within the rich tradition of German photography. Working primarily in colour and with a large-format camera, he brings a patient, analytical eye to the landscapes, communities, and domestic spaces of contemporary Germany, creating images that are formally precise yet […]

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February 16, 2026 - Family of Man / German / Photographer / Portrait / War - Conflict

August Sander

August Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, a small mining town in the Siegerland region of Germany, the son of a mine carpenter who worked the local ore deposits. The boy grew up in a landscape shaped by heavy industry and rural tradition, and his earliest understanding of the world was formed by the […]

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February 17, 2026 - Conceptual / German / New Topographical / Photographer

Bernd & Hilla Becher

Bernd Becher was born in 1931 in Siegen, a small industrial city in the Rhineland region of western Germany, surrounded by the coal mines, steelworks, and ironworks that had shaped the economy and landscape of the region for over a century. As a child, he watched the industrial structures of his hometown begin to be […]

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February 17, 2026 - Conceptual / German / Photographer

Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, a small town northeast of Berlin, in the final years of the Second World War. She grew up in postwar Germany, a country engaged in the painful process of physical and cultural reconstruction, and the relationship between architecture, memory, and public life would come to define her […]

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February 17, 2026 - Fashion / German / Photographer / Social - Street

Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. His father owned a button factory, and the young Helmut grew up in the comfortable bourgeois world of Weimar-era Berlin — a city of cabarets, cinema, and avant-garde art that would leave an indelible mark on his […]

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

How You Look At It- Photography of the 20th Century – Thomas Weski

From Amazon: This collection explores the various ways in which photography shaped our view of the 20th century, at the same time providing a record of the radical changes undergone by our towns, landscapes and private lives. Carefully juxtaposed with photographs the are paintings and sculptures.

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

Joachim Schmid

Joachim Schmid was born in 1955 in Balingen, a small town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and has devoted his career to one of the most radical and sustained interrogations of photography’s nature and purpose ever undertaken. Since the early 1980s, working from Berlin, Schmid has produced an enormous body of work without ever — or almost […]

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

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War, into a city that was being reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. He grew up in West Berlin, in the shadow of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 onwards, and it is impossible to understand his […]

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

Otto Steinert

Otto Steinert was born in 1915 in Saarbrücken, in the Saar region of Germany that would change national sovereignty several times during his lifetime. He studied medicine at the universities of Munich, Marburg, and Berlin, qualifying as a physician in 1939, and served as a military doctor during the Second World War. But photography had […]

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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.