Iconic.
A collection of images that inspire.
Steve Jobs in his Woodside home, 1982. A Tiffany lamp, a record player, and no furniture.
Steve Jobs in his home office in Palo Alto. Bookshelves, papers, and a NeXT workstation on the desk.
Steve Jobs working late at night. A bare bulb and a cluttered desk.
The original iPhone team, 2007. Phil Schiller, Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall, Eddy Cue. Photographed backstage after the announcement.
Susan Kare at Apple, 1984. She designed the Macintosh icons, the Chicago typeface, and the Happy Mac. She drew them pixel by pixel on graph paper.
Dieter Rams at his desk at Braun. Behind him, the Vitsoe shelving system. He spent 40 years at the company and designed over 500 products.
Dieter Rams with one of his Braun designs. Notable products include the T 1000 radio, the RT 20, and the SK 4.
Charles and Ray Eames reviewing slides at their studio at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California. They worked across furniture, architecture, film, exhibition design, and toys.
Charles and Ray Eames in their Case Study House, Pacific Palisades, early 1950s. Prefabricated steel and glass construction. The house still stands.
The Traitorous Eight at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957. They left William Shockley's lab, founded Fairchild, and invented the integrated circuit. Members later founded Intel and AMD.
Erik Spiekermann at his letterpress workshop in Berlin. He designed Meta, FF Info, Nokia Sans, and the Berlin transit system signage.
The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.
Oskar Barnack at his workbench at Leitz in Wetzlar. He built a compact camera that used 35mm cinema film. He called it the Leica.
Henri Cartier-Bresson with his Leica. He wrapped the chrome body in black tape to avoid reflections. He coined the term "the decisive moment."
Jiro Ono behind the counter at Sukiyabashi Jiro. Ten seats. Three Michelin stars. He started working in restaurants at age seven and has been making sushi for over seventy years.
Anthony Bourdain eating on a plastic stool in Hanoi. He visited over 80 countries during his career as a chef, author, and television host.
Barack Obama and Anthony Bourdain eating bun cha in Hanoi, 2016. Six dollar meal, plastic stools, two Hanoi beers. The meal is now preserved behind glass at the restaurant.
Anthony Bourdain on a train in Sri Lanka.
John Muir in the Sierra Nevada. He walked over 1,000 miles to Yosemite in 1868 with almost no provisions. He called the mountains "the Range of Light" and spent decades fighting to preserve them.
Elon Musk and SpaceX engineers sorting through Falcon 1 debris after its third consecutive failure, 2008. They had enough parts and funding for one more attempt. The fourth launch succeeded.
Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory, 1899. The electrical discharges are real. The photograph is a double exposure. He was attempting to transmit power wirelessly.
Richard Feynman lecturing at Caltech. Chalkboards filled with orbital mechanics, drawn by hand. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics.
In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.
Earthrise, December 24, 1968. Photographed by William Anders from Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon.
The Pale Blue Dot, February 14, 1990. Voyager 1 photographed Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. Carl Sagan requested NASA take the image.
Lunch atop a skyscraper, 1932. Eleven men eating on a steel beam 850 feet above Manhattan during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Dr. Zbigniew Religa after a 23-hour heart transplant surgery in Poland, 1987. His assistant sleeps in the corner. The patient outlived him.
Amelia Earhart in front of her Lockheed Electra, 1937. First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She disappeared over the Pacific forever, two months after this photo.
The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.
Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on the set of The Shining, 1980. Kubrick required Jack Nicholson to axe through 60 doors. He had Shelley Duvall perform the baseball bat scene 127 times.
Christopher Nolan behind an IMAX camera on the set of Interstellar, Iceland. The camera weighs approximately 100 pounds and shoots on 65mm film. He does not use a video monitor on set.
The docking scene from Interstellar. The Endurance is spinning at 68 RPM. Hans Zimmer composed the score on a Harrison and Harrison pipe organ. Christopher Nolan shot this sequence with miniatures, not CGI.
Pablo Picasso in his studio La Californie, Cannes, 1956. He produced over 50,000 works during his lifetime.
Henri Matisse making paper cutouts from his wheelchair, 1953. He was 83 and mostly bedridden. He called it "painting with scissors."
Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. He worked from this room for 30 years. After his death, the studio was relocated to Dublin. 7,500 items were catalogued.
Yves Saint Laurent outside the House of Dior, 1957. He was 21. Christian Dior had just died and the entire house fell to him. He became the youngest couturier in the world.
Yves Saint Laurent at his desk. He introduced Le Smoking, the women's tuxedo, in 1966.
Virgil Abloh in his studio. Trained as an architect. DJ. Artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. He died at 41.
Hayao Miyazaki at his desk at Studio Ghibli. He draws every key frame by hand.
Mike Matas's home studio. He designed the original iPhone UI at Apple, co-founded Push Pop Press (acquired by Facebook), and led design on Facebook Paper. Floor-to-ceiling glass, two desks, trees on all sides.
Christoph Niemann working at his desk. Illustrator for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and WIRED. Brushes, ink, paper, sketchbooks. He draws by hand first, always.
Vincent van Gogh's room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 1889. An iron bed, two chairs, a small table. He painted The Starry Night from the window of this room. He completed 150 paintings during his year here.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Bob Dylan at his typewriter, 1964. He wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in ten minutes and "Like a Rolling Stone" in one session on yellow legal paper. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
The Beatles crossing Abbey Road, August 8, 1969. Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the middle of the road. A policeman held traffic. He took six frames. They used the fifth.
Lionel Messi holding up his shirt at the Santiago Bernabeu, April 2017. Arguably the greatest El Clasico ever. He scored the winner in the 92nd minute against Real Madrid in front of 85,000 away fans.
Lionel Messi lifted by the crowd at Camp Nou after the Remontada against PSG, March 2017. Barcelona came back from 4-0 down to win 6-1. Sergi Roberto scored the sixth in the 95th minute.
Hans Zimmer's studio at Remote Control Productions, Santa Monica. Red velvet walls, vintage Moog synthesizers, a black Bösendorfer piano. He has scored over 150 films including The Lion King, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and Dune.
Freddie Mercury at Wembley Stadium, July 1986. 72,000 people. He held the crowd silent with vocal improvisation for over two minutes. Queen played 26 songs. He died five years later.
François-Paul Journe at his workbench in Geneva. He built his first tourbillon pocket watch at 20. His company motto: "Invenit et Fecit," he invented it and he made it. One of the last independent watchmakers producing movements entirely in-house.
La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Antoni Gaudí began work on it in 1883 at age 31. He spent the last 15 years of his life sleeping in the workshop on site. He was hit by a tram in 1926 and mistaken for a beggar. One hundred years later, it became the tallest church in the world.