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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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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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.