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

Paul Outerbridge

Paul Outerbridge was born in 1896 in New York City, into a family of comfortable means that encouraged his early interest in art and design. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and served briefly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps and the United States Army during the First World War. Upon […]

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

Paul Seawright

Paul Seawright was born in 1965 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the very beginning of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. He grew up in a working-class Protestant community on the north side of the city, in streets where the daily texture of life was shaped by sectarian division, military […]

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

Paul Strand

Paul Strand was born in 1890 in New York City, the son of Bohemian immigrants who had settled on the Upper West Side. His life in photography began at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where at the age of seventeen he enrolled in a class taught by the documentary photographer Lewis Hine. Hine introduced Strand […]

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

Peter Dench

Peter Dench was born in 1972 in England and came to photography through a circuitous route that included a degree in politics and stints in various jobs before he found his way behind the camera. He studied photojournalism at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication) in the late 1990s, and […]

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

Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar was born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, into circumstances that could scarcely have been less promising for a future artist. His mother was unable to care for him, and he was raised largely by his maternal grandparents on a farm in rural New Jersey. The isolation of his childhood, combined with an […]

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February 17, 2026 - British / Magnum / Photographer / War - Conflict /

Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths was born in 1936 in Rhuddlan, a small town in Denbighshire, North Wales, the son of a local government official. He grew up speaking Welsh, absorbing the values of a tight-knit community that prized education, nonconformist religion, and a deep suspicion of imperial authority — values that would prove remarkably durable when […]

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

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, into an Italian-American family. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later received his MFA from Yale University in 1979, where he studied under Tod Papageorge and was exposed to the conceptual approaches to photography that were beginning to reshape […]

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February 22, 2026 - American / Great Text Book / Writer /

PHOTOGRAPHY A Very Short Introduction – Steven Edwards

Review by Amazon Photography: A Very Short Introduction examines the definition, importance, and meaning of photography by combining a sense of the historical development of photography with an analysis of its purpose and meaning within a wider cultural context. Photographs are everywhere, in print and online. They are an integral part of our daily lives […]

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

Photography Changes Everything – Marvin Heiferman

 From Amazon: Photography Changes Everythingdrawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative offers a provocative rethinking of photography’s impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. At this transitional moment […]

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

Photography Today – Mark Durden

 From Amazon: A lively and accessible survey of photography as art since the 1960s, exploring how, in the hands of some of the world’s greatest photographic artists, it has developed into a respected and versatile artistic med

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RESOURCES

This is where I keep the research — over 190 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
You’ll find landmark exhibitions like New Topographics and The Family of Man alongside individual studies of Magnum photographers and many others who have shaped the way we see. From Atget to Eggleston, Arbus to Shore — the entries span the full history of the medium.
                                                      
You can also browse by genre — Street, Fashion, Landscape, Documentary and others. Most of these categories took shape during my MFA studies at the Belfast School of Art, and plenty of the people here appear in multiple categories.

NATIONALITIES