February 17, 2026 - American / New Topographical / Photographer

Henry Wessel

Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up on the suburban East Coast before the landscape of the American West would claim him entirely. He studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 under […]

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

Hippolyte Bayard

Hippolyte Bayard was born on 20 January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye, a small town in the Oise department of northern France. He moved to Paris as a young man and found steady employment as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a position he would hold for much of his life. But behind the unremarkable façade […]

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

Irving Penn

Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, the elder of two sons in a family of modest means. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, but it was Irving who first found his way into the visual arts. As a teenager he discovered […]

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

Jacob Aue Sobol

Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen in 1976 and grew up in Denmark with an early awareness that he wanted to engage the world through direct, physical experience rather than from a comfortable distance. He studied at the European Film College in the mid-1990s, where he first picked up a camera, and subsequently enrolled […]

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

Jacques Henri Lartigue

Jacques Henri Lartigue was born on 13 June 1894 in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, into a wealthy and indulgent family that provided him with both the leisure and the equipment to begin photographing at an astonishingly early age. His father, Henri Lartigue, was a prosperous businessman and an enthusiastic amateur photographer who gave Jacques […]

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

Jeff Mermelstein

Jeff Mermelstein was born in 1957 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and has spent the better part of four decades walking the streets of New York City with a camera, producing a body of work that ranks among the sharpest and most witty contributions to the American street photography tradition. He studied at the School […]

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February 17, 2026 - Canadian / Conceptual / Photographer

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has remained based in that city throughout his career, making it both his home and his primary subject. He studied art history at the University of British Columbia, completing a master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada movement, and subsequently spent time in London at […]

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

JH Engström

Jan Henrik Engström was born in 1969 in Karlstad, the capital of the Värmland province in western Sweden, a landscape of forests, lakes, and long winters that would remain a permanent presence in his photographic imagination. He came to photography through a characteristically Scandinavian path: studying at the University of Gothenburg’s School of Photography and […]

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

Jim Goldberg

Jim Goldberg was born in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent his career developing a form of documentary photography that is at once deeply personal and rigorously engaged with questions of social justice, power, and representation. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his MFA, and it was in […]

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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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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.