America's first glimpse of the seven young men who would lead the nation into space came at a NASA press conference in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959. It began with a picture session for the clamoring press photographers on hand -- the "grim little crawling beggar figures" Tom Wolfe...

Most of us are comfortable with a degree of laxity when it comes to the truth, and even willing to suspend disbelief when it suits our purposes. (I cite the popularity of the Kardashians and FOX News as examples.) When it comes to photography, however, we are less compromising. The...

There are people who own dogs and love dogs. And then there are those dog people--the ones who go a little overboard. These are the people who, as the artist William Wegman told me recently, "are so doggy, everything they do is sort of a dog thing."

It might come...

Photographer Jim Reed's business is severe weather, and this year business has been good.

I spoke this week with Reed, one of the country's premier severe-weather photographers, to get his take on the record-breaking abundance of tornadoes that have ripped across the country this spring, from the...

To the list of photographers who have died while covering war and conflict, we must now add the names of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, killed in Misurata, Libya on Wednesday. They join the likes of Ken Oosterbroek, a member of the so-called Bang Bang Club of photojournalists...

Their names are now just footnotes in the history of American motorsports: Jim Davis. Gene Walker. Fred Ludlow. Albert "Shrimp" Burns. Ralph Hepburn. Ray Weishaar. They were young men from farms and small towns who earned fleeting fame in the early decades of the 20th century by riding motorcycles around...

Every war brings with it a unique culture, and demands a unique voice to tell its story. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger may have found the voice, or voices, of the Afghanistan war.

Hetherington's new book, Infidel, is a slim, small-format volume that has the...

Every autumn around this time I start spending too much time in the art section of my favorite bookstores, turning the luxurious pages of the season's latest photography books. There are way more to look at than there used to be, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Two decades ago,...

A couple of weeks ago the W. Eugene Smith Foundation announced that Darcy Padilla, a San Francisco-based documentary photographer, was the recipient of its coveted annual grant for "Humanistic Photography."

That term has always puzzled me, because I am hard-pressed to think of any kind of photography that...

Toward the end of Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour, an oral history that traces the life and career of the late photographer, we are treated to a piece of wisdom from another famous image-maker who died in the past decade, Helmut Newton. He is quoted on the subject...

Toward the end of Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour, an oral history that traces the life and career of the late photographer, we are treated to a piece of wisdom from another famous image-maker who died in the past decade, Helmut Newton. He is quoted on the subject...

I suppose everyone is still pretty excited about those "lost" glass-plate negatives that perhaps were made by Ansel Adams back in the day. You are still excited, right?

I ask, because the story has taken a number of twists and turns over the past few months, and most of...