The closest to a Cinderella real-estate tale in Los Angeles has been the renaissance that is unfolding in its historic downtown district. The art world, and the developers who follow, continue to transform the once bleak and crime-ridden…

In photography there has been a continuous dialogue between documentary and art, between truth and a more expressive fiction that creates a meta-truth. Filmmaker Agnès Varda, who began as a photographer and has revisited that practice throughout her…

For the last 200 years, Africa has been struggling against colonial powers, corrupt despots, vicious warlords, tribal feuds, a rapacious slave trade, widespread poverty, plague, and starvation. Stark images of a stubbornly backward and beleaguered…

It is not unusual for a photographer to strive for transcendent images and so reach beyond the mere recording of the world before their camera. It is far rarer to find a spiritual devotee whose practice leads them to refine their photographic art.…

The career of many a photographer is as much a matter of serendipity, the good fortune of a timely and privileged vantage point, as artistic virtue. Guy Webster was born to shoot film and music icons. He grew up in 1940s-1950s Beverly Hills, the son…

Alice Wielinga has the soul of an intrepid explorer, going where many dare not tread. “For me, the drive to tell the story is more important than the fear.” In 2004, she visited South Korea, where she heard a young woman describe North Korea as…

Stephen Wilkes is a voyeur on an operatic scale. Although the first thing one sees in his epic photographs is a panorama that divides seamlessly between day and night, closer inspection will usually reveal a cityscape teeming with people engaged in…