In 1957, barely into his twenties, Lucien Clergue published his first photography book, and it came with a cover designed by Pablo Picasso, an introduction written by Jean Cocteau and poems selected from the surrealist Paul Éluard. Most photographers spend a lifetime chasing that kind of company. Clergue got it before he'd had a single major exhibition, and it wasn't luck. It was the payoff of a childhood spent surviving war, poverty and grief, and turning all of it into a ca

In 1954, the New York Times gave Peter Gowland a title that followed him for the rest of his life: America's No. 1 Pin-Up Photographer. It wasn't just a flashy headline. Gowland spent more than six decades photographing some of the most famous women in the country, sold over a thousand magazine covers, and got so annoyed with the cameras available to buy that he just started building his own instead. By the time he died in 2010, he'd designed more than twenty different camera

Almost everyone alive in 1993 remembers some version of what happened in that Manassas, Virginia apartment: Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband John's penis with a kitchen knife while he slept, drove off with it still in her hand, and became a late night punchline for the next decade. What almost nobody remembers, because it was never as funny or as tidy a headline, is what each of them actually did with the following thirty years. One built a nonprofit. The other built an arr