Photography

Somewhere in the churn of camera forums and social feeds, there’s an unspoken belief that a landscape photographer’s worth is measured in air miles. New country, new light, new content – the algorithm rewards novelty, and novelty rewards the photographer who’s always somewhere else. So it’s worth noting that Robert Canis has just published Elmley: First Light to Last, a 208-page…

As a professional photographer, I’ve seen a lot of stunning photographs – but there’s one image in particular that stopped me in my tracks this week: a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.” What keeps drawing me back to Maximilien Lamy’s photograph taken along the shore of France’s Lake Lacanau isn’t just the dramatic cloud rising off the Gironde wildfire, but the beachgoers calmly…

In 1936, Dorothea Lange approached Florence Owens Thompson – a 32-year-old sheltering with her children at a California pea-pickers’ camp – and took one of the most recognizable photographs in history. Migrant Mother portrays her with two children pressed against her shoulders, staring into the middle distance with an expression that seems to contain the entire weight of the Great…

The portrait is deceptively simple. Charli xcx leans back against a pale wall in a white crop top and dark jeans, her voluminous dark hair caught mid-movement, her gaze directed downward and slightly away from the camera. There’s no performance, no direct address, no obvious glamour. Just an intimacy and a slight vulnerability; the feeling of catching someone in a private moment rather than a…