About
About Max Luger
Photographer, founder of The Content Campus, and the editor behind Art Life.
The mission
TCC Art Life exists to give a diverse perspective on art, with no agenda beyond one: the spread of creativity.
“I was tired of living the life I was living.”Max Luger
The turn
Max Luger did not come to photography through a school or an assistant job. He came to it because he was tired of the life he was living.
In Manhattan, he was selling cocaine to wealthy clients. One of them was a photographer and a musician. Seeing how that man worked, and the life his work had built, changed everything for Max. He put the camera at the center of his life and never looked back.
Where he started
The road there was hard. Max was 16 when he went to Rikers Island. At 17, he was convicted on drug charges, and at 18 he spent time in solitary confinement in S-Block in Brocton, New York. He does not hide that history. It is part of why he photographs people the way he does: close, direct, and without looking down on anyone in the frame.
The work
He is self-taught. He studied Marketing and Communications at the Fashion Institute of Technology from 2004 to 2007, and in 2010 he founded The Content Campus, the creative brand behind this magazine. Sixteen years later, the work has taken him from New York to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami and Accra.
He was a campaign photographer for Target in 2011 and 2012, including the Taylor Swift Red project. He was the photographer on the Toyota campaign with Kevin Costner, hired as an independent contractor working with Saatchi & Saatchi. His RISD Class of 2020 editorial, which he photographed and art directed, was featured in Vogue and Paper magazine. He shot the India Love / Life of Pablo photo shoot for Kanye West in Los Angeles in 2016, photographed for Off-White with RSVP, and made a portrait of Bryan Cranston.
Music and the street
Music runs through all of it. Max is the frontman and harmonica player of Food for Cougars, with a sold-out show at The Viper Room in Hollywood and two appearances at SXSW, in 2015 and 2019. On Skid Row, he gave free haircuts to unhoused children and families through the Brown Bag Lady nonprofit, and his photographs of Los Angeles streets carry the same respect.
Now
Today Max is based in Los Angeles. He runs The Content Campus, is CEO of Codex Collective Inc. in Brooklyn, and edits TCC Art Life, a magazine of photography, music and culture from the U.S. and Ghana. In November 2025, Voyage ATL featured him as one of its Rising Stars.