London, July 2026

How does a person end up spending their life measuring the formation of galaxies? What about handcrafting watches on the Isle of Man, or dreaming up future cultural landmarks, or filing dispatches from a genocide alone? Platonic Press’s new collection explores the answers to these questions by pairing original black and white portraits with long-form conversations featuring some of the world's most remarkable practitioners.  

Portraits of Astronomers, Portraits of Architects, Portraits of Journalists, and Portraits of Watchmakers are four new books from the London-based independent publisher. In each of them, founder and photographer Minco van der Weide travels to meet more than fifty extraordinary people who have changed the landscape of their fields. In new interviews, they cover topics from village-bound childhoods to adolescent uncertainty, to the decisions that led them to the careers and lifestyles they love. Each conversation has been developed into a biographical essay and paired with black and white portraits taken on location. 

“I wanted to make books that show the lives of extraordinary professions which might not seem like obvious trajectories,” says Minco, who began this series as an extracurricular project at the University of Cambridge. The new collection follows Platonic Press’s well-received debut project, Portraits of Philosophers (2025), which emerged from Minco’s philosophy studies and reached its Kickstarter goal within one month of opening. It has since shipped to readers worldwide and can be ordered on Platonic Press’s website. 

Among those photographed and interviewed are Pritzker Prize laureate Eduardo Souto de Moura; Roger Smith, the sole apprentice of watchmaking legend George Daniels; Françoise Combes, recipient of France's CNRS Gold Medal and Chair of Galaxies and Cosmology at the Collège de France; Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4's international editor and sole English-speaking correspondent in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide; and Pulitzer Prize winners Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, the investigative journalists whose collaborative reporting on the Panama Papers earned them the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. 

Each volume is a linen-bound square hardcover (24.5×24.5cm), printed on matte uncoated paper with foil-stamped cover, ribbon bookmark, headband, and tailband. Pre-orders are open now on our Kickstarter page, at [link], where backers can secure all four volumes at an early-supporter price ahead of the general release. The campaign runs until 1 August 2026. RRP £45,- per volume. General release September 2026.