‘I bought my first erotic photograph in the mid-1980s,’ Danny Moynihan tells me. ‘I had come across some photos of Austrian origin of rather portly looking ladies in petticoats playing with sex toys. I thought they were rather amusing.’ Moynihan is an artist and a curator. He has collaborated frequently with his friend Damien Hirst [...]

On patrol near the Mississippi river one afternoon in November 1955, Lt RE Brown of the Arkansas State Police spotted a suspicious, ‘foreign-looking’ man driving down the highway in a battered old Ford and pulled him over. Unshaven and shabbily dressed, the man didn’t have proper ID and his car was full of maps, foreign [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]