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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, a small town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany. He grew up in the quiet, orderly landscape of the postwar Rhineland, a visual environment that would leave its mark on the measured, analytical quality of his mature work. In 1973, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie […]

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

Timothy H. O’Sullivan

Timothy Henry O’Sullivan was born around 1840, most likely in New York City, though some accounts place his birth in Ireland, from which his parents had recently emigrated. Very little is known of his early life, and the scarcity of biographical detail has contributed to the somewhat mythic status he holds in the history of […]

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February 20, 2026 - American / Photographer / Portrait / Reflexivity, Home & Family /

Tina Barney

Tina Barney was born in 1945 into the rarefied world of New York’s social elite. She grew up on the Upper East Side and spent summers in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and Sun Valley, Idaho. She came to photography relatively late, studying at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in the mid-1970s and then […]

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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