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

Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein was born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Connecticut River whose industrial history would prove unexpectedly relevant to the work that would define his career decades later. His father ran a furniture store in the city, and Epstein grew up surrounded by the textures of a declining New […]

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

Nadar

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was born in Paris in 1820 and would become known to the world simply as Nadar — a name he adopted in his youth and that would come to stand for an entire era of French cultural life. Before he ever picked up a camera, Nadar had already established himself as a journalist, […]

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

Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander was born in Tel Aviv in 1961 to South African parents of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, and the family moved to Johannesburg when he was still a child. Growing up under apartheid, Kander developed an early awareness of the way power structures shape the visible world — who builds, who is displaced, whose presence is […]

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

Naomi Harris

Naomi Harris is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Toronto whose work has consistently been drawn to the margins of North American culture — the communities, rituals, and gathering places where people shed their everyday inhibitions and construct alternative versions of themselves. Her photographs are characterised by their vivid colour, their unflinching intimacy, and their […]

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February 17, 2026 - Photographer / Social - Street / South Korean

Nikki S. Lee

Nikki S. Lee was born Lee Seung-Hee in 1970 in the small town of Kye-chang, South Korea. She studied photography at Chung-Ang University in Seoul before moving to New York in 1994 to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, followed by graduate studies at New York University. It was in New York — that great […]

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

Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in the Minowa district of Tokyo, near the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, and the geography of his birth would prove prophetic. He grew up in a neighbourhood saturated with the history of desire, entertainment, and the floating world, and from his earliest years he absorbed the visual culture of a […]

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

Otto Snoek

Otto Snoek is a Dutch contemporary photographer whose work occupies a distinctive space between documentary observation and poetic interpretation. Working primarily in the Netherlands, Snoek brings to the familiar landscapes, interiors, and domestic scenes of his home country an eye that is simultaneously precise and dreamlike, finding in the flat Dutch terrain and its distinctive […]

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

Patrick Zachmann

Patrick Zachmann was born in 1955 in Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb south of Paris, into a family whose Jewish heritage had been obscured by the traumas of the Second World War. His grandparents had survived the Holocaust, but the family seldom spoke of their origins, and Zachmann grew up in an atmosphere of deliberate forgetting. This […]

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

Paul Graham

Paul Graham was born in 1956 in Stafford, a quiet market town in the English Midlands, and grew up in an era when British photography was largely divided between the black-and-white social documentary tradition and the colour work of commercial advertising. Graham would spend his career dismantling that division, demonstrating through book after book that […]

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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.