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

Anna Fox

Anna Fox was born in 1961 in Alton, a small market town in Hampshire, in the heart of the English countryside that would become one of the enduring subjects of her photographic work. She grew up in a middle-class household in a part of England that is often perceived as comfortable, conventional, and politically conservative […]

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February 16, 2026 - American / Fashion / Photographer / Portrait / Reflexivity, Home & Family / Social - Street

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut, the third of six children in a military family. Her father, Samuel Leibovitz, was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and the family moved frequently throughout her childhood — from Connecticut to various bases across the country and overseas. This itinerant […]

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

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was born on 20 February 1902 in San Francisco, California, the only child of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman whose family fortune had been built in the timber industry, and Olive Bray Adams. The great earthquake of 1906 threw the young Adams against a garden wall, breaking his nose and leaving him […]

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

Anthony Hernandez

Anthony Hernandez was born in 1947 in Los Angeles, the city that would become the singular subject of his life’s work. Raised in a working-class Mexican-American family, he grew up in the neighbourhoods of East Los Angeles and witnessed firsthand the social stratification, racial tension, and relentless urban transformation that would define his photographic vision. […]

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

Anton Bruehl

Anton Bruehl was born in 1900 in the small outback town of Hawker, South Australia, the son of German immigrants who had settled in the arid farmlands of the Flinders Ranges. His early life in the Australian bush gave little indication of the glamorous career that lay ahead. As a young man he trained as […]

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

Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman was born on 3 March 1918 in New York City, though he grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and later in Miami Beach, Florida. His family’s circumstances were modest; his father managed a series of small businesses, and the young Newman showed an early aptitude for drawing and painting. He won a […]

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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 - American / Photographer / Social - Street

Barbara Norfleet

Barbara Paine Norfleet was born in 1926 in Lakewood, New Jersey, into the very world of American privilege that would later become the central subject of her photographic work. She grew up in comfortable, educated surroundings and attended Bryn Mawr College, one of the elite women’s institutions of the American Northeast, where she studied the […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Landscape - Cityscape / Photographer / Portrait / Social - Street

Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott was born on 17 July 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, and grew up in circumstances that were anything but auspicious for a future artist. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was raised in difficult conditions. Fiercely independent from an early age, she left Ohio as soon as she was able, moving […]

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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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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.