With its galleries, photo agencies, studios, history of magazine publishing and reputation for breeding leading photographers, New York is commonly hailed as the home of photography. Yet until this spring the city has lacked a major festival of photography to call its own. This position is set to change with the inaugural New York Photo [...]

Before she married a Beatle, Linda McCartney was a professional photographer. During the 1960s, her celebrated shots of rock gods such as Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix (whom she famously photographed mid-yawn) helped to invent the genre of rock photography. She was the first female photographer to have work - a portrait of Eric Clapton [...]

Albert Kahn’s collection of early colour photographs started as a banker’s dream of putting an end to war. Almost 100 years on, they provide a unique portrait of a different world.
Even among keen students of photography, few have heard of Albert Kahn. Yet Kahn, a banker and philanthropist, was one of the first people to [...]

Long before he became a photographer, the American artist Gregory Crewdson was a guitarist in a band. In the mid-Seventies, he and four friends founded a power-pop group called the Speedies that produced several underground hits and played venues across New York, including the celebrated punk club CBGBs. The band dissolved in 1981, but the [...]

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the [...]

The soft-colored photographs of Sze Tsung Leong capture contrasting landscapes: the verdant green of Germany; the mirage of shimmering towers in Dubai; the urban geometry of Amman, Jordan; the red tiles roofs of Italy. But always the eye is drawn to the distinct line where sky meets earth.

Canale della Giudecca, 2007
In Mr. Leong’s panoramic photographs [...]

This year’s shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shows a welcome shift of emphasis. Whereas 2007’s nominees had rather intimidating, introspective themes, this year each of the artists has flung his net outwards with a keen, almost evangelical fervour, to create social observations which make full use of photography’s talent for conferring beauty on [...]