Peter Fetterman

Back when the world shut down in 2020, Peter Fetterman, a long-time photography collector and dealer with a gallery in Santa Monica, California, began sharing one image a day in an e-newsletter he dubbed The Power of Photography. Accompanying the daily photograph would be a brief ode to the artist at hand, whether a personal memory or a case for the photographer’s contributions to the medium. Each instalment served as a sorely needed moment of beauty in a sorrowful time.

There were portraits of the famous (Lincoln, Churchill, McCartney and

Lennon, Muhammad Ali) and of regular folks, including a stunning Edward S Curtis 1904 image of a Hopi man. From Alfred Eisenstaedt’s vintage shot of an ice-skating waiter (wearing tails, no less) in St Moritz and Ruth Bernhard’s graceful nude to Miho Kajioka’s ghostlike peacock and Paul Caponigro’s exquisite pears, the memorable works are too plentiful to enumerate. But Fetterman, who, as of press time, continues to bestow on his lucky contact list a daily treasure – his total is just shy of 700 – has compiled 120 of them into a new book, The Power

Left: Muhammad Ali vs Sonny Liston, shot by Neil Leifer in 1965. Above: head waiter Renee Breguet serving drinks on the Grand Hotel’s ice rink in St Moritz, shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1932.