Peter Kayafas (born 1971) is an American photographer, publisher, and educator based in New York City.
He creates black and white photographs that are "simple and spare, yet quietly overpowering with their evocation of a history on a scale beyond that of individual human lives.
[2] He is Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Corporation of Yaddo and was an adjunct associate professor of photography at Pratt Institute for 21 years.
[8][9] During his college years, he worked as a printer for Rosalind Fox Solomon and Sylvia Plachy, and studied with Nan Goldin, Anthony Barboza, and A. D.
[11] In 1990, he met and began working for Leslie George Katz, founder and publisher of the Eakins Press.
[15] As a publisher and editor running the Eakins Press Foundation for three decades, Kayafas has produced books by photographers.
[16] Coney Island Waterdance is a collection of photographs by Kayafas taken between the years of 1991 and 2002, which depicts swimmers in the summertime as well as the Polar Bear Club in the winter.
The New Yorker called his Cuba photographs "crisp and direct, and the best of them vibrate with understated graphic tension.
[21][22] Totems is an exhibition and publication project by Kayafas that consists of photographs of abandoned buildings in the west that The New Yorker said "have both sculptural presence and a symbolic weight."
According to a review of the book in Hyperallergic from April 14, 2020: "Kayafas has come back with what surely constitutes one of the most exhaustive, vivid photographic studies of a region to be produced anywhere in recent decades.