Charlotte Cotton is a curator, writer and creative consultant who has explored photographic culture for over twenty-five years. She has held positions including curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, head of programming at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and curator-in-residence at Katonah Museum of Art, NY; ICP, NY; and Metabolic Studio, Los Angeles. She was the founding Artistic Director of the Tasweer Photo Festival, Qatar from 2019 - 2024. Her book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004), is published in fourteen languages and has been a key text in charting the rise of photography as an undisputed art form in the 21st century. The fourth edition was released in September 2020.
Cotton has curated prescient exhibitions and international biennials with artist-led themes in contemporary photography. Her Photography is Magic Daegu Photo Biennial in South Korea (2012) and book (2015) surveys over eighty artists whose photographic practices shape the possibilities of our contemporary, Postinternet image environment. Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self addresses the complex intersections of our rights to be seen and heard while claiming the privilege of privacy. The inaugural exhibition was held at the ICP, NY (2016-17) and published as a reader of reflections by over thirty artists and cultural thinkers in 2018. In 2022, she curated the touring exhibition Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum, first shown at ICP, NY.
Cotton is also known as an astute chronicler of fashion image-making culture. Her critically acclaimed publication and exhibition projects have included Brigitte Niedermair: Me and Fashion (Venice Biennale, 2019), Guy Bourdin (V&A, 2003), and Imperfect Beauty (V&A, 2000). She has written the main texts for books, including Piers Hanmer: Distracted by Fashion (2025), Ezra Petronio: Visual Thinking and Image Making (2023), Charlotte Cotton + Harley Weir (2022), Louis Vuitton Fashion Photography (2014), Viviane Sassen: In and Out (2013), and Nick Knight (2009). Cotton is also the author of Fashion Image Revolution: The Art and Technique of Brian Dowling (2018) and key opinion essays about fashion image-making for Aperture, Self Service, Art in America, Muse Magazine, Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar Italia and System magazine.
She is the founder of two photography discussion websites: Words Without Pictures (2008-09) and eitherand.org (2012-15) and co-founder of www.narrative.new (2025).
