Category: Photography
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Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Geometry of the Instant Henri Cartier-Bresson invented a way of seeing so complete that it became the unconscious grammar of photography itself. Then, quietly, he put down the camera and went back to drawing. He had always said it was a sketchbook, not a vocation. He meant it. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris,…
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See Something – Irving Penn 2026
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. See Something Irving Penn is everywhere in 2026. Three cities, three exhibitions, and the case for making a trip specifically to see him Irving Penn directed his models with two words. Not an expression — he was…
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Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There
She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portrait…
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The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country obsessed with images of itself. It is not enough for America to exist; it must be seen existing. It must be staged, framed, printed, reproduced, circulated, believed. From the battlefield photograph to the fashion spread, from the Depression migrant to the moonlit desert, from the civil-rights witness to the…
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Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention
Eight years after his death, the critic, novelist, and storyteller who changed how we look at art remains the most generous — and the most radical — writer England ever produced. By Bergotte There is a moment in the first episode of Ways of Seeing — the 1972 BBC television series that made John Berger,…
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The Wound and the Camera: Susan Sontag and the Unfinished Project of Seeing
Twenty years after her death, the great critic’s ideas about images, suffering, and the moral life feel less like history than like prophecy. By Bergotte There is a photograph that Susan Sontag never saw — or rather, she could not have seen it in the form we now encounter it, scrolling past it on a…
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Steven Meisel: The Eye of Fashion’s Modern Age
In fashion, there are names that decorate the mastheads and those that define eras. Steven Meisel belongs firmly to the latter category. For more than four decades, his lens has not only chronicled fashion but authored its mythology. His images—precise, provocative, and relentlessly transformative—have made him both a magician of surfaces and an architect of…
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The Two Alfreds: Eisenstaedt and Wertheimer
In the vast history of twentieth-century photography, two Alfreds stand out for the way they captured the essence of their time: Alfred Eisenstaedt, the German-born émigré whose elegant eye helped define Life magazine’s golden era, and Alfred Wertheimer, the Brooklyn-based photographer whose intimate portraits of a young Elvis Presley gave the world its first candid…
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Man Ray: The Alchemist of the Lens
No artist embodied the restless experimentation of the twentieth century quite like Man Ray (1890–1976). Painter, photographer, filmmaker, and Surrealist provocateur, he refused categories, moving fluidly between avant-garde circles in New York, Paris, and Hollywood. His work transformed the camera from a tool of documentation into an instrument of imagination — a device capable of…
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Martin Parr, photographer who transformed the everyday into cultural testimony, dies aged 73
Martin Parr, the British photographer whose saturated colours, wry humour and unflinching eye reshaped documentary photography, has died aged 73 at his home in Bristol on 6 December 2025. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, Parr’s interest in photography was encouraged early by his grandfather, himself a keen amateur. He studied at Manchester Polytechnic in…
