Finally, it is now something approaching warm here in the UK!
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A big warm welcome to all of you joining me this week here on the TPE newsletter. There's a lot in photography that is so important to being able to be confident with the camera, and make creative choices feel effortless.
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That's what we're looking at this week a technique that has never been taught in a tutorial.
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The Main Frame:

Here's something I've come to believe after thirty years behind a camera.

We don't get better at photography by taking more photographs.

Not really.

We get better by spending time inside the minds of the photographers who came before us.

It sounds counterintuitive.

Surely the path to becoming a better photographer is to photograph more. And yes, mileage matters. But mileage without direction is just movement.

The photographers I admire most weren't just out there shooting. They were in a deep, ongoing conversation about the history of photography. With photographers like Cartier-Bresson and Lartigue, with Eggleston and Arbus. Not just looking at the photos, but also listening to the words.

This is the part of photography that almost nobody talks about on the gear forums.

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When we watch an old interview with Bill Brandt, or sit with a documentary about Sebastião Salgado, or listen to Saul Leiter shrug off thirty years of obscurity with a quiet smile, something happens that no YouTube tutorial can replicate.

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We start absorbing not just how they made pictures, but how they thought. How they decided. How they kept going through years of being ignored. How they trusted an idea long before the world caught up.
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That's the rabbit hole. It's the key to being creative with a camera - not just knowing the settings, but HOW the photographer decided to make those choices.

And it's bottomless in the best possible way.
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You'll start with one photographer, and within a week, you'll have discovered six more you'd never heard of.
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André Kertész leads to Brassaï leads to Robert Doisneau.
Andreas Feininger leads to Alfred Eisenstaedt leads to a whole world of Life magazine you never knew existed.
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The constant questions about settings, sensors, and sharpness are becoming less important. Because once we've spent an afternoon with the thoughts to photographers, we stop worrying so much about whether our camera is good enough. We start worrying about whether we're seeing enough.

That's the shift. And it doesn't come from another tutorial. It comes from sitting with the work, and the words, of those who walked this path before us.

The Curator's Gallery:
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​Jacques Henri Lartigue​
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Lartigue is the perfect rabbit-hole entry point. A French boy with a camera, photographing his own family at play — racing cars, swimming pools, women in extravagant hats at the Bois de Boulogne. He wasn't trying to make art. He was just paying joyful attention to his own life. The world didn't notice his work until he was nearly seventy. The pictures had been waiting all along.
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The thing I enjoy most about his photography is the joyful freedom it has. Here is a photographer who isn't wondering whether he's doing things the right way or conforming to an ideal. He seems to embody that spirit that is so vital in a photographer, just seeing something and going, hey, this looks awesome, I want to share this with you.

The Weekly Observation:

This week, pick one photographer you've heard of but never properly studied. Just one.

Find a documentary, a long-form interview, or a monograph if you have one on your shelf. Spend an hour with them. Not skimming — actually sitting with the work and listening to how they talk about it.
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To make your life easier, I have a playlist for you! ​
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Then, before you go out with your camera next, ask yourself: what did they teach me about seeing that I didn't know yesterday?

You'll find that the next time you raise the camera, something has subtly shifted. Not in your settings. In your attention.

Inside the Tribe:

Photographers from all over the world watch YouTube content, read this newsletter, and are part of the TPE tribe.
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One of the great things about this is that a very diverse set of opinions contributes to our pool of inspiration.
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However, one of my members asked me the other day, and he said where are the non-Western photographers Were the photographers not specifically members of the tribe, but where are the photographers that we can draw inspiration from who aren't European, who aren't American?
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I thought about this a bit, and he's right. The history of photography has a somewhat narrow view regarding People we should look to for inspiration.
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I'd like to ask you to help with this who are photographers that you enjoy aren't what we could call mainstream for want of a better word?
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Who are the people from South America, Africa, India and the subcontinent, Indigenous peoples, and Asia?
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If you know of any, please drop me a line
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Everything I wrote about today goes deeper into the Tribe — a supportive space where photographers grow together using the vocabulary we're all learning. Not competition. Not scoring. Conversation.

If you'd like to see what that looks like, I keep a quiet page about it here:

👉 What's inside the Tribe​
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Alex