Welcome to The International Review of Photography
Why now.
I’ve spent 25 years in the photography world... It was time.
After seeing the extraordinary Man Ray: When Objects Dream exhibition at The Met last year, I was reminded — in a room full of rayographs, paintings, and some of the most inventive photographs ever made — how powerful a single image can be. How it can stop time, rearrange how you see the world, and stay with you long after you’ve left the gallery.
Man Ray is probably my favorite artist. Not just photographer — artist. He refused to be confined by medium. He painted, sculpted, made films, and then walked into a darkroom and invented an entirely new way of making photographs, placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper and letting chance and light do the rest. Tristan Tzara called them captures of the moments “when objects dream.” That restlessness, that refusal to accept boundaries between art forms — that’s what has always drawn me to photography. It’s never just one thing.
That exhibition crystallized something I’d been feeling for a long time.
I’ve been involved in the photography world in many ways over the past 25 years — as a publisher, a gallerist, an art fair producer, an exhibitor. In 2008 I launched Fabrik Magazine, a print publication out of Los Angeles built on the belief that if you put beautiful work in front of people and wrote about it with care, they’d show up. In 2014 I founded Photo Independent, a curated international showcase for high-caliber independent photographers — because the artists doing the most exciting work deserved a direct line to the collectors, curators, and professionals who could change their careers. Then the pandemic came, print stopped making sense, and we moved everything digital. LA Insider. The Intentional Artist. Each one built on the same idea: curation matters. What you choose not to include matters as much as what you do.
Now we’re turning that lens — literally — to photography.
The International Review of Photography is a weekly newsletter covering the global photography art world. Exhibitions, fairs, auctions, photobooks, emerging photographers. The entire landscape, distilled into something you can read in five minutes on a Monday morning.
Why photography, why now? Because it’s the most democratic art form in history, and yet the world that surrounds it — the galleries, the collectors, the fairs, the market — can feel impossibly scattered. There are excellent publications doing deep work. But nobody is pulling it all together into one concise, weekly read. That’s what this is.
This isn’t another photography magazine. The world has those, and they are brilliant. This is the thing you read before you read those — the weekly scan that tells you what’s happening, what matters, and what you might be missing. Five minutes on a Monday morning. Then you go deeper wherever you want.
Oh, and you may have noticed our logo — a P with a blinking cursor? It's not decorative. Photography never stops. Every week there's a new story, a new image, a new voice. The cursor is always waiting for what comes next. So are we.
Issue No. 1 arrives Monday.
Chris Davies
Publisher & Editor