For more than two decades, Charlotte Cotton has been at the vanguard of the evaluation of modern art photography. She debuted the International Center of Photography's new home on the Bowery in New York with her exhibition and program Public, Private, Secret as the museum's first curator in residence in 2015-16. The exhibition sparked a number of discussions, which resulted in the publication of this book. Cotton has also worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Photographers' Gallery in London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Wallis Annenberg Photography Department; the Katonah Museum of Art in New York; and Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles. She has worked as a visiting scholar and critic at The New School and NYU in New York, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and Otis College in Los Angeles.

She is the cofounder of Words Without Pictures and Eitherand.org, as well as the author of Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) and The Photograph as Modern Art. Cotton's headquarters are in Los Angeles, California.