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  • Everybody Says Break the Rules Bend Them Instead

    Everybody Says Break the Rules Bend Them Instead

    Breaking the rules is the contrarian pose everyone reaches for, but the rules got to be rules by working. Bending one keeps the principle and pushes the letter further. Thirds become fifths, and symmetry stays put and gets interrupted.

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  • The Met Opens Its First Japanese Photography Show in Thirty One Years

    The Met Opens Its First Japanese Photography Show in Thirty One Years

    A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens opens at the Met on Thursday and runs to May. Tōmatsu, Ishikawa, Ishiuchi and Tokiwa, drawn entirely from the museum’s own collection, with Okinawa and the base towns as the thread.

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  • What Is in Your Bag That You Never Use?

    What Is in Your Bag That You Never Use?

    Every one of us is carrying something that has not come out of the bag in a year, and we all knew what it was before we finished the title. Here is why it is in there, what it is costing us, and the two questions that settle it.

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  • The Decision Your Exposure Dial Cannot Make

    The Decision Your Exposure Dial Cannot Make

    High key and low key are not filters, and the exposure dial cannot produce either one. Both come from the light we go looking for, how much of the frame each tone is given, and which single thing we protect.

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  • Your First Month in Black and White

    Your First Month in Black and White

    New to black and white? This is everything we wish someone had told us in the first month. Why the decision happens before the shutter, what to photograph while you learn, and the camera setting that shows you the picture in gray first.

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  • A Photo Story: They Gas Us Because They’re Afraid

    A Photo Story: They Gas Us Because They’re Afraid

    More than thirty metro stations were shut the morning RV crossed Paris for a camera meetup. She left the group walk, went back for a sign she had passed an hour earlier, and found a city still arguing on its own walls.

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  • How to Photograph the Dark

    How to Photograph the Dark

    Night rewards black and white more than any other light, and almost everything the camera does automatically is wrong about the dark. Five changes, starting with metering the light instead of the scene.

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  • Behind The Shot With Paul Hillerich

    Behind The Shot With Paul Hillerich

    A girl bent over a mandala in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, 2012. Paul Hillerich on the frame he calls The Painter, what remains when color recedes, and why he believes a photograph begins when somebody else looks at it.

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  • Do Your Photographs Have a Shelf Life?

    Do Your Photographs Have a Shelf Life?

    A 2026 study of five and a half million posts puts the half life of a social media post at about 18 hours, and a page on your own site at two years. The difference is not quality, it is architecture. Here is how to stock a longer shelf.

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  • Salgado and Steinert Are Both in the Next Leitz Auction

    Salgado and Steinert Are Both in the Next Leitz Auction

    The 49th Leitz Photographica Auction runs on November 28 in Wetzlar. Lot 205 is the Leica R6 that Sebastião Salgado used on the burning oil fields of Kuwait in 1991, sold with two signed prints. Otto Steinert sits two lots earlier.

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