Gordon Parks, I Am You

Though Gordon Parks is best perhaps best known as the filmmaker behind the iconic blaxploitation movie Shaft it is his photographic documentation of much of the Civil Rights era that pays the greatest testament to his legacy as an artist.

Nan Goldin, The Beautiful Smile

The Beautiful Smile by Nan Goldin is a newly reprinted book of the photographer’s Hasselblad award-winning photo series. Critically-acclaimed, but with a cult impact, Goldin’s work highlights the permanence of loss, but also the power of memory.

Inhuman Subhuman Superhuman, Rick Owens

Together with his wife and creative collaborator Michele Lamy, Rick Owens’ work, lifestyle and playful commentary on the fashion industry has attracted interminable curiosity. As for his clothes, the asymmetrical cuts, meticulous draping, and convention-defying design has established his brand as a niche, but, global, empire.

Duane Michals, Portraits

Over the course of an ongoing 55-year career, Duane Michals has constantly reinvented himself and, in many respects, the conventions of the narrative photographic story, never content to settle on the limitations imposed by technology or taste. We consider his legacy through the prism of his celebrity portraits.

Larry Clark, Forever Young

During a career that spans nearly half a century, his work has attracted praise, “a wake-up call to the modern world”, and from the other side, “nihilistic pornography”. Photographer, film-maker, artist and counter-cultural figurehead Larry Clark captured youth culture before youth culture was even a thing.

Gentrification, Carolyn Drake

The port city of Vallejo, California, has long been known for its gangs, bad schools and crime. Exacerbating its reputation as a “miserable place”, the city declared bankruptcy in 2008 after the core of its economy, the naval shipyard on Mare Island, shut down.

Astrid Andersen, Girls Will Be Boys

A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Andersen has been steeped in authentic men’s streetwear from the start, although she declines to label her clothes as such. “It’s neither streetwear or sportswear. It’s a lifestyle brand. It’s about redefining luxury and lifestyle using elements from sports and streetwear because these are the essentials for our generation.”

Brian Griffin, RAF Benson

As one of the UK’s most prominent portrait photographers, Brian Griffin has, for the majority of his career, been taking images of a world that seems imbued with a particularly British sensibility. And by that, we’re not alluding to our post-Brexit state of island insularity, but one that has consistently, yet perhaps secretly, embraced a sense of the anarchic.

Figure Dancing

In recent years there has been a notable resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art (it never went away, but now it’s flourishing in a way that was hard to imagine at the beginning of the decade), and it’s from here we can tell the story of this resurgence by looking at five pictures made in the 21st century and considering how they relate to the history of painting.

Young Americans, The New Age of Stateside Jazz

The birthplace of jazz, America has always maintained an intrinsic tie to the improvised genre. From the jaunty angles of ragtime to the swinging bombast of New Orleans big band, be-bop freneticism, West Coast ‘cool’, Afro-Cuban multiculturalism, and amorphous cosmic freedom, the United States lays claim to the definitive lineage of the genre.

Abigail Jones, A Taste for Perfection

Abigail Jones has recorded much of the past nine years of her life in a series of autobiographical paintings, drawings and collages titled A Taste for Perfection. It’s a seductively illustrated diary of thoughts and observations, swinging from the personal and political and back again, and it’s funny. Brutally honest, but brutally funny.

Thurston Moore, Ecstatic Sundays

Being assured of your place as one of the most influential guitarists of your time in an era-defining band is one thing, but where does a creative spirit such as Thurston Moore’s land when such intensity stops being productive?

John Edmonds, Some Type of Togetherness

Since graduating from the Yale School of Art last year, John Edmonds, 28, has enjoyed an unusually fast ascent to international prominence. Two of his series of photographs, in particular, have been the subject of much writing and discussion, and while they’re timely and important images, they’re also very beautiful.

Joe Webb, Balancing Dark and Light

With three solo shows in London in the last 12 months, Joe Webb is about to fill his original hometown, at this fascinating moment in its history, with his sharp visions of 21st-century life.

Peter De Potter, All Statues Sing Protest Songs

Belgian visual artist, writer, and curator Peter De Potter has long been known for his collaboration with fellow countryman Raf Simons, helping to define and refine the fashion designer’s aesthetic during the noughties, creating all his imagery between 2001 and 2009 and acting as art director for Simons’ book Redux.

Dries Van Noten, 1-100

Following Dries Van Noten’s 100th collection in March earlier this year, the Belgian designer is commemorating a 30-year legacy with a new retrospective book.

Mr & Mr Smith

The young star of Baz Lurhman's short-lived hip-hop saga The Get Down was photographed by rap royalty the RZA for THE FALL's latest issue. Meet the relaxed charm and charisma of Justice Smith.

Veruschka!

As one of the supermodels of the Swinging Sixties, she was described as “the most beautiful woman in the world” by the photographer Richard Avedon. But it was only by stepping down from the catwalk and exploring the world as an actor and artist that Vera von Lehndorff-Steinort’s journey to contentment was completed.

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