Peter Kayafas is a photographer, publisher, curator and teacher who lives in New York City where he is the Director of the Eakins Press Foundation. His photographs have been widely exhibited, and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The New York Public Library; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the New Orleans Museum of Art; and the DeCordova Museum, among others. He has taught photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn since 2000, and is the Vice Chairman of the Board of the Corporation of Yaddo. In addition to two other monographs (The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta and O Public Road! Photographs of America) his new book Totems, with an essay by Jed Perl, is available from the Purple Martin Press.

“Kayafas is an artist who keeps his strength in check.… [His photographs are] as initially unassuming as they are ultimately powerful. Kayafas’s pictures are rich in knowledge…. Candid is just the beginning.”
-Boston Phoenix, March, 2005

“His pictures are crisp and direct, and the best of them vibrate with understated graphic tension.”
-The New Yorker, March, 2005

“Kayafas’s images have a timeless quality. They’re simple and spare, yet quietly overpowering with their evocation of a history on a scale beyond that of individual human lives.” –Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe, January 2012