Through My Lens: Ten Photographers Who Keep Me Looking Closer
Zoë Marin
Written by Zoë Marin in Beyond the Frame Photography

Through My Lens: Ten Photographers Who Keep Me Looking Closer

By the time you fall in love with photography, you stop asking what makes a photo “good.” Instead, you ask: what did it stir in me? Over the years, I’ve come to admire a certain kind of image—the ones that hold tension and tenderness at once, that let light and shadow say what words can’t. This list is personal, intuitive, and lovingly incomplete. Just ten artists who continue to shape how I see, feel, and think about the photographic frame.

In no particular order, because how do you even rank poetry?

  1. Rinko Kawauchi
    Kawauchi’s images feel like small prayers. In Illuminance, the sacred hides in plain sight—a pale hand, a strand of hair, the glint of glass. She captures the ephemera of being alive with a kind of soft precision I return to again and again.
Untitled from the series Illuminance, by Rinko Kawauchi. Source: www.lensculture.com
  1. Gordon Parks
    More than a photographer—an oracle, really. Parks knew that the camera could be a tool for empathy, justice, and revolution. His portraits and photo essays are still burning bright, still opening eyes.
Emerging Man, Harlem, New York, 1952, by Gordon Parks.
  1. Zanele Muholi
    A visual activist in the fullest sense. Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series is both a personal archive and a collective cry. Every self-portrait is a monument to resilience, resistance, and radiant Blackness.
Qiniso The Sails Durban, by Zanele_Muholi. Source: www.zammagazine.com.
  1. Viviane Sassen
    If surrealism had a heartbeat, it would sound like Sassen’s work. Her colors are bold, her compositions wild, her vision unapologetically her own. In fashion or fine art, she bends the rules with elegance.
Photo by Viviane Sassen. Source: www.blind-magazine.com.
  1. Alec Soth
    There’s a loneliness to Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi that feels oddly familiar. His America is quiet, a little awkward, and achingly human. He makes you fall in love with strangers.
Sleeping by the Mississippi. Charles, by Alec Soth. Source: www.magnumphotos.com.
  1. LaToya Ruby Frazier
    Frazier’s lens is unflinching, but her gaze is full of care. The Notion of Family is an intimate reckoning—with race, industry, environment, and inheritance. It’s both testimony and tribute.
Mom and Mr. Yerbys Hands.The Notion of Family, by LaToya Ruby Frazier.
  1. Vanessa Winship
    Winship’s portraits are weightless and heavy all at once. In She Dances on Jackson, you feel the echo of movement in stillness. Her work gives space—for vulnerability, for ambiguity, for breath.
Untitled from the series She Dances On Jackson, by Vanessa Winship. Source: photoeditions.co.uk.
  1. Maya Rochat
    Rochat pushes the frame until it dissolves. With paint, transparency, metal, and movement, she reimagines what photography can be. Her pieces feel more like weather systems than images.
A Rock Is a River – Meta Rainbow, by Maya Rochat.Source: 1854.photography.
  1. Rachel Nixon
    In The Garden of Maggie Victoria, Nixon speaks in fragments—petals, fabric, light filtered through grief. Her work is quiet, but never passive. It lingers like perfume on an old scarf.
Maggie Victoria – Fondest Love From Mother, by Rachel Nixon.
  1. Daido Moriyama
    Grainy. Gritty. Glorious. Moriyama’s Tokyo is a sensory overload in monochrome. His photographs don’t ask for your attention—they seize it. Raw, immediate, and always in motion.
Untitled from Japan Photo Theater, by Daido Moriyama.
A list is never a final word—it’s more like a constellation you look up to for a while. These are the stars I’ve been following lately. And maybe that’s what photography is at its best: not a mirror, but a map to something deeper.
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