Barry Tanenbaum

Stephen Shore fondly recalls his Polaroid SX-70. Shore, known for color images of everyday America, in books like Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, loved the immediacy of the SX-70. “Whatever you observed and chose to picture was right there,” he says of that ingenious little device.

John Conn has photographed landscapes, landmarks, and the underwater world, but his passion for documentary storytelling has resulted in his most compelling images: apartheid-era South Africa, residents of a Bowery flophouse, patients in a cancer hospice, the subways of 1970s New York City, and, starting three years ago, the homeless of Manhattan.<

Dr. Alan Sloyer, traveling with his son in Kochi, India, somewhat reluctantly agreed to a sunset cruise. “It wasn’t really my thing,” Dr. Sloyer says, but when sunset turned startlingly dramatic it became very much his thing: a passion for photographing memorable travel moments.

The temperature was 19 degrees on a late February morning last winter on the beach at Nantucket, Massachusetts. About 300 yards out the ocean was icing up, and the waves rolling in had the consistency of freshly mixed concrete. Checking things out was pro photographer Jonathan Nimerfroh.