What if the next story that changes someone’s mind — or inspires them to act — comes from your camera roll? Today, thanks to smartphones, photo essays are no longer just the domain of professional photographers. Anyone — parents documenting family life, students working on a project, nonprofit leaders highlighting impact, or travelers recording a […]
More than 50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the environmental and health consequences of “Operation Ranch Hand” — the U.S. military’s aerial spraying of herbicides containing dioxin — continue to unfold. Agent Orange, the most widely used of these herbicides, left behind contamination in the soil, water, and food systems of Southeast […]
For Sandro Miller, art is more than expression — it’s protest, it’s healing, and it’s a form of resistance we can’t afford to lose. The Chicago-based, award-winning photographer’s book Dance for Life celebrates the language of the body as expressed by the city’s most celebrated performers. His 16 years of charitable work with the dance-based […]
Photography has the extraordinary power to document, inspire, and connect. As Director of Photography for the Make It Better Foundation, a contributing editor to photography publications around the world, and a photographer with over four decades of experience, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with some of the most talented photographers who have captured the […]
For more than 135 years, National Geographic has upheld its mission to inspire people to care about the planet, using storytelling to illuminate the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Since publishing its first black-and-white photographs in 1905 and debuting color images the following decade, the magazine has continued to push the boundaries of […]
As a young child, Jan Tratnik stepped off a bus and into conversation with a “small man” in a child-size car. A photo of this interaction between Jan and what was actually a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared in the Sunday paper soon thereafter. She was fascinated by this. Thus was born her life-long passion for photography. […]
As we close the chapter on 2022, we asked some of our favorite Chicago-area photographers to share their standout image from the year. Here are their favorite images, and the stories behind them. Avinash Biradar “Morning Stillness – Chicago is such a busy city, buzzing with all kinds of noise. But, early morning sunrise is […]
Vivian Maier, the photographer who famously left behind thousands of prints and negatives that were only discovered after her death, has earned almost as much notoriety for her mysterious life as for her stunning photography. Slowly, details of her time working and shooting in the Chicago suburbs are coalescing in much of the same coincidental […]
As the year comes to a close, we asked some of our favorite Chicago photographers to share their standout image from 2021. Here are their favorite images, and the stories behind them. Avinash Biradar “2021 had some memorable sunsets in Chicago and I was able to capture many of them. This particular sunset came out […]
There are places that happen to you and places you choose. For photographer Dorothea Lange, California was both. She was 23 years old when she left her native New Jersey and arrived in San Francisco. The year was 1918 and she thought she was just passing through — instead, she stayed for the rest of her […]
