Tom May

Tom May

Tom May is a freelance writer and editor specializing in art, photography, design and travel. He has been editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. He has also worked for a wide range of mainstream titles including The Sun, Radio Times, NME, T3, Heat, Company and Bella.

Latest articles by Tom May

Streetlights shine through the mist as two beavers touch noses, in a wetland on the edge of a building site in Olsztyn, Poland. Here's how Jan Wieczorek photographed this award-winning scene

By Tom May Published

News His stunning monochrome image won the 2026 Rewilding Europe Award. Here's the story behind it.

News
Two young women sit in a diner booth with cups of coffee, one resting her chin on her fist and staring at the camera while the other points a 35mm camera straight back at the photographer.
A student photographer wandered the streets of Detroit with a camera in 1972, then left the negatives in storage for four decades. Now they're an award-winning exhibition, and that teaches us something profound about viewing our old work

By Tom May Published

NEWS Dave Jordano's rediscovered 1972 street photos bring the Motor City of old back to vivid life

2 Comments
NEWS
Bonnie & Clyde
A Texan man found a photo album in a garage that may hold unseen pictures of Bonnie and Clyde. But caution over their authenticity points to a deeper lesson about how we should safeguard our own photography for future generations

By Tom May Published

NEWS The evidence seems convincing, but camera angles and missing provenance give reason for caution

NEWS
Most photography exhibitions only show photographs. Leica tried another approach in Amsterdam, and I think they're onto something

By Tom May Published

Opinion By giving silk weaving and photography equal billing, Lexar and Leica's show became more than the sum of its parts.

Opinion
Woman using her laptop webcam for video conferencing
The best laptop webcam in 2026: built-in cameras that show you at your best

By Ian Evenden Last updated

buying guide Sharpen up your video calls, with the best laptop webcams built in to computers today

buying guide
Portraits of Kae Tempest and Sunil Gupta dressed in white against a white background
His photographs are famed for giant sets and fairytale fantasies, so why is Tim Walker shooting portraits on plain white backgrounds?

By Tom May Published

News Britain's master of photographic fantasy is going back to basics in a 250-portrait London show

News
Black and white photo of David Bowie leaning out of a car window at night, pointing angrily at the camera with his teeth bared.
Punched by Bowie, thumped by Jagger and swatted with a newspaper by Dylan: a new book reveals what it really took to get the shot as a paparazzo, long before autofocus did the hard work

By Tom May Published

Forget autofocus tracking and 30fps bursts: this veteran tabloid photographer's new book recalls a time when fieldcraft, nerve and legwork mattered more

Photojournalism
The powerful images of 20th-century American photographer Gordon Parks have been analyzed endlessly, but now it's the turn of the people he caught with his camera to have their say

By Tom May Published

News Voices in the Mirror pairs his best-known images with new reflections from the people and families he captured

News
Photography festivals work better with a theme, and Bristol has built an entire biennial around this single unsettling idea

By Tom May Published

Time Machine brings multiple exhibitions to south-west England this October, all built around photography's strange relationship with time, history and memory

Galleries and Exhibitions
At the 1986 Wackersdorf anti-nuclear protest, a shirtless man raises his arm mid-shout as a couple embrace beside him, a dark storm-clouded sky filling the background.
German photographer Wolfgang Zurborn spent lockdown scanning his pictures of crowds, and learned something profound about finding order inside chaos

By Tom May Published

BOOKS Crowds is a new book gathering together four decades of dense, color-saturated street photography

BOOKS
best opera glasses
The best opera glasses: pocket sized binoculars for theater and stage

By Sebastian Oakley Last updated

Buying guide Going to the opera, theater or a concert? Enhance your experience with the best opera glasses available today

Buying guide
A low-angle, black-and-white photo of Cameron Winter passionately singing and playing an electric guitar onstage under bright stage lights.
The unsung art of standing in the pit as a music photographer: three decades of rock history and Gibson guitars through the lens of Scarlet Page

By Tom May Published

NEWS A new exhibition brings together on-stage, backstage and stage-side portraits of everyone from Kiss to Geese

NEWS
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 15 Aura laptop review
The best monitor calibrators in 2026: keep your on-screen colors accurate

By Ben Andrews Last updated

buying guide Make sure your screen is displaying colors accurately, with the best monitor calibrators on the market

buying guide
Two clowns stand talking on a night-time pavement outside a shuttered baby goods shop, lit by the shop's glowing window display.
French photographer Nicolas Rachline transforms deserted streets into film noir, elevates mood over moment, and demonstrates that every picture doesn't actually need to tell a story

By Tom May Published

This music video producer turned photographer presents a decade of nocturnal, cinematic street imagery in his debut book

Books
A reversed portrait of the actor Claude Delacroix in a hat, and a photo of Baby Muth seemingly flying the air
Philippe Halsman fled Paris in 1940 with nothing but his camera and 12 prints. After his death, his grandson found the glass plates he left behind – and they offer a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of a photography legend

By Tom May Published

book Thames & Hudson's new book reveals how Philippe Halsman developed his eye as a working photographer.

book
A two-panel comparison of Martian rock and rover wheel tracks, with the false-colour decorrelation stretch version highlighting mineral variation that's invisible in the natural-colour image
How an app based on NASA color science is helping photographers reveal the secrets of ancient civilizations

By Tom May Published

NEWS Dstretch can be used to extract detail from pictures that previously seemed impossible to recover

NEWS
Imaged from Light and Magic exhibition
People were arguing about what "real photography" was more than a century before anyone had heard of an Instagram filter, as highlighted by this exhibition on the Pictorialism movement

By Tom May Published

NEWS Light and Magic at London's Tate Modern traces Pictorialism's rise across multiple continents, from the 1880s to the 1960s

NEWS
Gentoo Penguin striding along beach on New Island, Falklands
An English photographer bought a ravaged, wind-lashed Falklands island in 1972 to give it a second chance. Now, as Argentina and Britain argue over the archipelago once again, millions of seabirds continue to benefit from his remarkable vision

By Tom May Published

Feature New Island's remarkable recovery offers a counterpoint to the saber-rattling around it

Feature
A century of National Geographic's best US photography, gathered together in one beautiful volume, makes me want to go out and shoot on film again

By Tom May Published

news Timed for the USA's 250th birthday, TASCHEN's new 700-image retrospective is an intoxicating read

news
Selection of the best graphics cards for video editing photographed on a green background
The best graphics cards for video editing in 2026

By Ben Andrews Last updated

Updated Speed up your workflow with one of the best graphics cards for video editing.

Updated
The cover image for Cowboy Kate & Other Stories (1964), a close-up portrait of a woman in a black hat with tousled blonde hair falling across one eye.
Strange but true: one of the photographers who defined the look of London's Swinging Sixties was actually working 5,000 miles away

By Tom May Published

Born and raised in South Africa, Sam Haskins turned ordinary young women into icons, creating some of the era's most influential images from a Johannesburg studio

Fashion Photography
Magnum Photos' British photographer Ian Berry poses in front of his exibition "Ghana's Disposable Children" during the 19th International Festival of Photojournalism/Visa pour l'Image, 06 September 2007 in Perpignan.
RIP Ian Berry, the Magnum photojournalist who shot the only photos of the Sharpeville massacre, and who spent more than seven decades working hard, being humble, and insisting the job was never about the gear

By Tom May Published

Obituary The English photographer has died aged 92, leaving behind an astonishing legacy of work

Obituary
August Sander: Bohemians (Willy Bongard and Gottfried Brockmann), 1922-1925
Taken from the last years of Imperial Germany, and through the Weimar Republic into the Nazi era, these rarely seen images by pioneering portrait photographer August Sander highlight just how wide his range was

By Tom May Published

A new exhibition marking the photographer's 150th anniversary digs into the lesser-known corners of his archive

Galleries and Exhibitions
Hand putting SD card into a card reader attached to a laptop on a desk
The best memory card readers in 2026: copy images and video to your computer

By Ben Andrews Last updated

Buying Guide These are the best memory card readers to supercharge your SD, CFexpress & CompactFlash memory card image transfers

Buying Guide
Film still from the 2026 movie The Girl with the Leica
New film 'The Girl with the Leica' reminds the world that photographer "Robert Capa" wasn't a real person, but a shared byline that almost erased Gerda Taro's name from history

By Tom May Published

News Premiering at Venice Bienale, the movie retells the story of a real-life female photographer whose shots were credited to someone else.

News
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