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Chris McCaw has been getting his hands wet in the darkroom from the age of 13, and since then he has been unable separate his personal life from his photographic life. In a constant state of production of photographic work from that early age, he continues to be excited about the medium.

The early years involved self taught explorations in skateboarding/ zine /punk scenes with a fisheye lens and Tri-X through the mid-late 80’s. After high school he learned everything he could about photography. Finally he fell in love with the simplicity of large format cameras, and in 1992 got his first 4”x5”. The following year he fell in love with the platinum/palladium printing process and even larger cameras. To this day Chris makes his living through the platinum/palladium process. Currently he’s working the boundaries of analogue photographic mediums with his project titled Sunburn.

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Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. A recent chapter of the series, Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands.

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Daido Moriyama is a Japanese street photographer best known for his confrontational, black-and-white images depicting the contrast of traditional values and modern society in postwar Japan. Notable for his rejection of technical precision in favor of the grainy and high-contrast images produced by a compact camera, the artist captures a diaristic experience of wandering city streets. “The city has everything: comedy, tragedy, eulogy, eroticism,” he has remarked. “It is the ideal setting, the place where people’s desires are interwoven. It has remained and will always remain my natural element.”

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Driven by her interest in “control, accidents, and contrivance,” Laura Letinsky is best known for her exquisitely composed still life photographs, redolent with ambiguity. Early in her career, she photographed couples in the intimacy of their own homes, creating sensual visual narratives about love and relationships. By the late 1990s, Letinsky stopped photographing people and replaced them with objects—a stained napkin, orange peels, half eaten bits of candy—that hinted at human presence. Keenly aware of the rich narrative possibilities inherent in still lifes and influenced by 17th-century Dutch still life painting, Letinsky crafts tabletop vignettes that suggest larger narratives, as she explains: “It’s this idea that the narrative has already occurred; the meal has been eaten, the cornucopia has been consumed, something has been consummated, and this is what’s left in the early morning light.”

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Thomas Struth is a contemporary photographer whose work captures the complexity of a range of subjects including urban scenes, Hawaiian rain forests, and intimate portraits. In one of his best-known projects, the Museum Photographs, the artist photographed museum visitors while admiring works of art, serving as an examination of both fleeting and eternal moments. “[When] I am taking a photograph, I am conscious that I am constructing images rather than taking snapshots,” he said of his process. “Since I do not take rapid photographs it is in this respect like a painting which takes a long time where you are very aware of what you are doing in the process.”

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Rineke Dijkstra is a contemporary Dutch photographer. Known for her single portraits, usually working in series, she often focuses on particular groups and communities of people, such as mothers, adolescent and teenage boys and girls, soldiers, etc., with an emphasis on capturing the vulnerable side of her subjects. “With young people everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed. “When you get older you know how to hide things.”

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Richard Mosse’s photography captures the beauty and tragedy in war and destruction. Mosse has shot abandoned plane wrecks in the furthest reaches of the planet and the former palaces of Uday and Saddam Hussein now occupied by US military forces. His Infra series captures the ongoing war between rebel factions and the Congolese national army in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Infra series is marked by Mosse’s use of Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued reconnaissance infrared film. The film registers chlorophyll in live vegetation. The result is the lush Congolese rainforest rendered into a beautifully surreal landscape of pinks and reds. Mosse said in an interview with The British Journal of Photography "I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict… I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed."

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs straddle truth and fiction by combining real people and places—but not necessarily people and places that naturally go together. The theatricality of his images is carefully constructed: he arranges the objects of each scene and devises precise lighting and framing for every project. His work is often described as cinematic, a description that diCorcia deplores. He insists that his pictures suggest rather than elucidate a full narrative. His brand of storytelling results in unstable, unfixed images that point in certain directions but never provide a definitive map.

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Shirin Neshat is a contemporary Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” Born on March 26, 1957 in Qazin, Iran, she left to study in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley before her the Iranian Revolution in 1979. While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. 

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In suburban settings or on elaborately detailed sets of American homes, interiors, and neighborhoods, Gregory Crewdson stages haunting, cinematic photos of alienation and eerie quietude. “I’ve always been interested in wanting to construct the world in photographs,” he has said. Crewdson’s work combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with a dreamlike quality reminiscent of such filmmakers as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch. Yet unlike those directors, Crewdson is compelled by how the still image freezes time and sets limitations, “like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved question,” he describes. His quietly disturbing American settings, with their immaculately staged lighting and somber, solitary figures, are often seen as functioning in conversation with the works of Edward Hopper.

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Sophie Calle (b. Paris, France, 1953) uses the mediums of photography, video, film, books, text, and performance to pursue her sociological and autobiographical investigations. Her work often incorporates elements of voyeurism, surveillance, and personal narrative to explore the nature of love, intimacy, violence and death. Many of her works juxtapose writing and photography to question the dichotomies of truth versus fiction and public versus private.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto is a contemporary Japanese photographer whose esoteric practice explores memory and time. Using the intrinsic quality of long exposure photography, the artist provides insight into how the medium can both obscure and alter reality. Influenced by Dadaist and Surrealist theory, Sugimoto’s Seascapes, Dioramas, and Theaters, craft mysterious scenes from vernacular subject matter. “Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world,” the artist said. “Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.”

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Photographing subjects as diverse as flowers, kinbaku (the Japanese art of rope-tying), and Tokyo street scenes, Nobuyoshi Araki continues to astound viewers with a plethora of beautiful and provocative images. Themes of love, sex, death, consumption, natural beauty, and femininity, have inspired Araki since his days as a student of film and photography in the early 1960's. Never willing to compromise his sometimes outrageous vision, Araki uses photography to record and elaborate his visceral emotional reactions to everyday encounters with life and death: “Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.”

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Jeff Wall’s work synthesizes the essentials of photography with elements from other art forms—including painting, cinema, and literature—in a complex mode that he calls “cinematography.” His pictures range from classical reportage to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at the larger scale traditionally identified with painting.

Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he still lives. He became involved with photography in the 1960s—the heyday of Conceptual art—and by the mid-1970s he had extended Conceptualism’s spirit of experimentation into his new version of pictorial photography. His pictures were made as backlit color transparencies, a medium identified at the time with publicity rather than photographic art. These works had a startling effect when exhibited in galleries and museums, playing a part in the establishment of color as an important aspect of the aesthetics of photography.

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Andreas Gursky is a German artist known for his large-scale digitally manipulated images. Similar in scope to early 19th-century landscape paintings, Gursky’s photographs capture built and natural environments on a grand scale. Often taken from a lofted vantage point, the artist latter splices together multiple images of the same scene. This dizzying repetition of elements creates a surreal monumentality, as seen in his 99 Cent (1999). “In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical,” he mused. “Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.”

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Rachel Baran is an extraordinarily talented U.S.-based photographer who creates amazing surreal and conceptual portraits that thousands of people have fallen in love with. 

One of the best things about Baran’s work is that it’s constantly evolving and growing. As such a young photographer, she’s still trying out different styles and inspirations. Some of her images are dark, introverted and full of suffering, while others encapsulate the young and artistic photographer’s youth and joy. What’s most important, however, is that all of them are creative and very well-done.

Baran experiments with different methods for creating her photos as well. Some are simply manipulated in Photoshop while others are created by combining multiple photographs. Best of all, Baran posts images on her Facebook breaking down the creative process behind some of her more complex photographs, showing us what different images went into the creation of her final picture.

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Rinko Kawauchi is a contemporary Japanese photographer known for her lyrical images of elemental subjects. Based in the Shinto religion as well as the works of Irving Penn, Kawauchi’s photographs capture ordinary moments with a profound almost hallucinatory perspective. “From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth,” she has mused. “I want imagination in the photographs I take. It’s like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.” Born on April 6, 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, she began pursuing photography while attending the Seian College of Art and Design in Osaka during the early 1990s. Working mainly in advertising for a number of years after graduating, Kawauchi published her first photo book in 2001 and went on to release several others, including Illuminance (2011), Ametsuchi (2013), and Halo (2017). She currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Today, Kawauchi’s works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among others.