Photography artists and their official websites

Erik Johansson constructs impossible situations from photographic material, aiming for scenes that remain visually convincing even when their logic breaks down. The Swedish photographer and visual artist, born in 1985, is based in Prague. His practice centers on personal projects and exhibitions rather than the unaltered capture of a passing moment. On the artist's website, finished images sit alongside accounts of the work process, giving viewers a route back from the illusion to its construction. That connection matters when studying composite photography: perspective, lighting and scale must cooperate even when the subject could not exist. Readers can begin with a finished scene, identify where its spatial assumptions become unstable, and then explore the process material to see how separate photographs were brought into one apparent world.

Brooke Shaden creates staged photographic worlds in which nature, grief and imagination meet. Her artist statement describes a largely solitary self-portrait practice: she becomes both the maker of the image and a figure within it. Working with the surroundings of Northern Arizona, she often builds scenes on location rather than treating landscape as a neutral backdrop. The resulting compositions use darkness and vulnerability alongside the possibility of hope. Her website combines the images with process material and teaching, allowing readers to move between a scene's narrative and the decisions behind its making. A useful starting point is to follow how the body relates to the ground, vegetation and available space. Those relationships give concrete form to themes of change and loss without requiring the photograph to illustrate a single literal story.

Tyler Mitchell makes photographs and films that explore the possibilities of Black leisure, self-presentation and imagined freedom. Based in Brooklyn, he works across commissioned fashion imagery and projects developed for exhibitions and books. His early photobook El Paquete, published in 2015, followed architecture and skateboard culture in Havana. Later work brings portraiture, outdoor settings and the language of fashion into dialogue with questions about who gets to inhabit an idyllic scene. His artist website allows these strands to be considered together rather than reducing the practice to a prominent magazine cover. For a first reading, compare the placement of a figure in a landscape with the construction of a commissioned portrait. The settings, gestures and relationships between people can carry as much meaning as the individual face.

LaToya Ruby Frazier develops photographic and moving-image projects through sustained relationships with people confronting unequal access to work, healthcare and a livable environment. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1982, she made The Notion of Family with her family and hometown as central subjects. The project connects intimate domestic life with the effects of industrial decline. Her archive also includes Flint is Family and The Last Cruze, extending the inquiry to water, public health and the experience of autoworkers. Rather than treating a portrait as a self-contained image, these bodies of work ask readers to follow relationships across time. The artist's website provides a route through the individual projects and their contexts, making it possible to compare the formal choices of documentary photography with the collaboration on which the work depends.

Viviane Sassen moves between art photography and fashion, with an exhibition and publication history that makes the relationship between those fields central to her practice. Born in Amsterdam in 1972 and based there, she studied fashion design before photography at Utrecht School of the Arts and Ateliers Arnhem. In and Out of Fashion brought seventeen years of fashion work into a museum presentation at Huis Marseille in 2012. Later surveys include Hot Mirror and Phosphor: Art & Fashion. Her website and publication record offer ways to compare different sequences of images rather than treating commercial assignments and gallery work as unrelated careers. Following one body of work from photographs to a book and then an exhibition is especially helpful for understanding how selection and arrangement change the experience of the images.

Thomas Struth's photographic archive offers a careful way to study the relationship between viewers, architecture and the histories embedded in public space. He began studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973 and entered Gerhard Richter's class the following year. The website organizes photographs into groups accompanied by contextual texts, allowing a reader to move from the image to the circumstances and questions behind it. The Rome photographs, for example, consider how a monument, a planned piazza and a small car coexist within one frame. Museum Photographs shifts attention toward people looking at art and the space that organizes their looking. Read together, these works invite comparison between the apparent stillness of a photograph and the social arrangements it contains. The series structure rewards looking across several images rather than searching for one signature picture.