February 17, 2026 - British / Landscape - Cityscape / Photographer / War - Conflict

Donovan Wylie

Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971, at the very start of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. Growing up in a city defined by division, surveillance, and the constant presence of military infrastructure, Wylie developed an acute sensitivity to the ways in which political power inscribes itself upon […]

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

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]

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

Doug DuBois

Doug DuBois is an American photographer whose practice is defined by the depth and duration of his engagement with his subjects. Where many photographers pass through communities, extracting images and moving on, DuBois commits to relationships that extend over years, sometimes decades, building a body of work that earns its intimacy through sustained presence and […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Conceptual / Photographer

Duane Michals

Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]

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March 4, 2026 - British / Fashion / Photographer / Portrait / Terrible Three

Duffy

The most rebellious of the “Terrible Three”, Duffy created the defining image of David Bowie’s career with the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt, then walked away from photography entirely.

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

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England, a market town on the outskirts of London. He emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in San Francisco around 1855, where he worked initially as a bookseller and publisher’s agent. The circumstances of his transformation from a […]

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February 17, 2026 - American / Conceptual / Photographer

Ed Ruscha

Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]

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February 17, 2026 - Conceptual / Dutch / Family of Man / Photographer

Ed van der Elsken

Ed van der Elsken was born in 1925 in Amsterdam, into a middle-class family that offered little encouragement for artistic ambitions. He studied sculpture briefly at the city’s academy of art before turning to photography, a medium that suited his restless, confrontational temperament far better than the slow deliberation of working in three dimensions. In […]

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

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, a city in the industrial heartland of Canada’s Niagara region. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants, and his father worked at the local General Motors plant — a detail of biography that would prove formative, for it was in the vast, roaring factories and the scarred […]

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

Edward Steichen

Edward Jean Steichen was born in 1879 in the village of Bivange, Luxembourg, and emigrated with his family to the United States as an infant, settling in Hancock, Michigan, before the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother encouraged his artistic inclinations, and by the age of fifteen he had begun a four-year apprenticeship at […]

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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.