Julie V. Garner

Malick Sidibé (1935–2016) was a Malian photographer known for his black-and-white pictures of youth culture and nightlife in Bamako in the years after Mali's independence in 1960. He was born in Soloba, a Fula village about 300 kilometres from Bamako, where his father was a stock breeder, farmer and hunter. He later studied at an art school in Bamako. In 1955 the photographer Gérard Guillat hired him there to decorate his studio, then took him on as an apprentice.

Mathew B. Brady (c. 1822–1896) was an American photographer whose studios produced many of the best-known portraits of 19th-century public figures and a large share of the surviving photographs of the American Civil War. He left little record of his early life. Late in life he said he was born in Warren County, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, though earlier official documents gave his birthplace as Ireland.

Deana Lawson is an American photographer and artist whose staged portraits explore Black identity, family, intimacy, sexuality and spirituality. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1979, she received a BFA in photography from Pennsylvania State University in 2001 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. She lives and works in New York. Lawson’s photographs often bring together people, domestic interiors and carefully arranged objects.

Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American photographer and educator known for his photographs of Black communities in the American South. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, he studied photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1972. He later completed an MFA at Yale University, studying with Walker Evans. In 1982, Lee joined the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he established its photography program.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to travelling and discovering new places, particularly the beauty and scale of unfamiliar landscapes. There has always been something captivating about standing somewhere completely new, taking in the surroundings, and experiencing the world beyond what I know. Over time, this love of travel gradually developed into a passion for photography, allowing me to preserve the places I visit and share the way I experience them.

Though I had held a camera since childhood, it was a ski trip to Colorado that completely transformed my relationship with the craft. Captivated by the majestic scale of the mountains, I purchased my first SLR, driven by a deep need to capture and share that breathtaking beauty. This creative spark quickly grew into a broader mission to document America’s most iconic landscapes.