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

Susan Lipper

Susan Lipper was born in New York in 1953 and came to photography after studying at Yale University, where she completed an MFA under the guidance of Tod Papageorge. Her education at Yale placed her within one of the most rigorous programmes in American photography, but her work would develop in directions that departed significantly […]

Read More
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 […]

Read More
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.

Read More
February 23, 2026 - French / Great Text Book / Writer

The Mind’s Eye – Henri Cartier-Bresson

 From Amazon: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s writings on photography and photographers have been published sporadically over the past 45 years. His essays―several of which have never before been translated into English―are collected here for the first time. The Mind’s Eye features Cartier-Bresson’s famous text on “the decisive moment” as well as his observations on Moscow, Cuba and China […]

Read More
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 […]

Read More
February 23, 2026 - American / Curator / Great Text Book / Writer

The Photographers Eye – John Szarkowski

 From Amazon: The Photographer’s Eye, available again after some years out of print, offers a guide to the medium’s visual language through works by such early masters as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Strand and Weston. In this re-issue, 172 illustrations reveal the extraordinary range of the photograph from the early days of the medium’s development to the […]

Read More
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 […]

Read More
February 17, 2026 - German / Magnum / Photographer / Social - Street

Thomas Hoepker

Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936 and grew up during the devastation and reconstruction of postwar Germany. His grandfather, a portrait painter, gave him his first camera when he was a teenager, and by the time he was sixteen he had won first prize in a youth photography competition organised by a German […]

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

Thomas Joshua Cooper

Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco in 1946 and raised in the American West, where the vast landscapes of California and the desert Southwest formed the earliest coordinates of his visual imagination. He studied at Humboldt State College in Northern California before undertaking graduate work at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, […]

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

Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in the small town of Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany. He grew up in a rural landscape of extraordinary visual quietness, a backdrop that would make the cool, analytical rigour of his later work all the more striking. In 1977, he enrolled at […]

Read More

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.