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Abelardo Morell is undoubtedly one of the most compelling visual artists of our time. Rather than relying heavily on Photoshop and the latest camera gear, his images come from a unique way of looking at the world. One of his most notable works is his Camera Obscura series, which he initially photographed with a large-format [...]

The two-lane blacktop slices through the high Nevada desert, as Jane Hilton’s 1966 gold Mustang speeds past sagebrush and tumbleweed toward snow-clad mountains hovering like clouds in the distance. This lonely, desolate stretch of U.S. Route 50 is far from London, England — where she lives — yet she couldn’t feel more at home. Since [...]

Richard Sexton and I share an interest in and an abiding affection for photographing Louisiana, the city of New Orleans and Cuba. I had wanted to meet him since purchasing his book, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence (Chronicle Books, 1993), which was recently reissued along with Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road [...]

Macduff Everton’s recent book, The Modern Maya, Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatán (University of Texas Press, 2012) is a work of visual anthropology, with images and text by Everton. The subject of the book is a culture in transition over a period of four decades, beginning in 1967. Everton has earned much success [...]

Look at Edgar Angelone’s black-and-white gelatin silver and platinum photographs, and you’ll see more than the beautiful scenes on which he trains his medium-format camera. His images explore the possibilities of darkness and light beyond the visual, in the realms of reverie and memory, intellect and emotion. “My art is a unique expression of my [...]

Charles Grogg is known internationally for his fractured photographic images. Printed in silver or platinum/palladium on handmade Japanese paper, he stitches their components together with tethers, sutures or other three-dimensional material. The resulting works address issues of growth and restraint, hesitation and power.

The poet and photographic historian John Wood observes:

Charles Grogg’s photographs are hauntingly beautiful. And they are strange… Strings and wire are often an integral part of a Grogg photograph… wire, string, tendrils, roots, veins, all the connecting tethers of life, become his metaphor…

Where, one might ask, is the beauty of a mud dauber wasp’s nest, a stapled envelope, a cracked egg, or a woman with a tree’s roots on her head? It is all in the making. The very fact that Grogg can make beautiful photographs of such subjects speaks to the selectivity of his eye and the power of his craft.

While growing up in northern San Diego County, Bill Dewey was aware of photography because his two grandfathers were serious amateur photographers. His maternal grandfather had studied with the photographer William Mortensen. In the 1930s, Mortensen worked as a Hollywood portrait photographer, also staging and photographing elaborate (and sometimes bizarre) tableaus using the style and techniques of the nineteenth-century Pictorialists. Dewey remembers photographs of costumed, [...]

There’s an old saying that goes, “If something really belongs to you, you can’t lose it.” That statement directly applies to photography and Mitch Dobrowner. After he discovered photography as a teenager and began achieving recognition in his early 20s, he left it behind to start a business and a family — only to return to the camera 20 years [...]

Food: nourishing, fun, vital. We are all consumers of this necessity of life. We see the tempting images all around us on billboards, on the store shelves, in magazines and on the menus we order from at our favorite eatery. As photographers, we also can see beauty in the interaction between light and a superbly prepared and styled entrée. Visually communicating and creating the desire is what the professional food photographer does.