Nicholas Nixon
Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947 and grew up in a middle-class family in the suburbs. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1974 under the tutelage of Beaumont Newhall. It was there that Nixon committed […]
Read MorePaul Seawright
Paul Seawright was born in 1965 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the very beginning of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. He grew up in a working-class Protestant community on the north side of the city, in streets where the daily texture of life was shaped by sectarian division, military […]
Read MorePhilip Jones Griffiths
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in 1936 in Rhuddlan, a small town in Denbighshire, North Wales, the son of a local government official. He grew up speaking Welsh, absorbing the values of a tight-knit community that prized education, nonconformist religion, and a deep suspicion of imperial authority — values that would prove remarkably durable when […]
Read MoreRichard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born on 15 May 1923 in New York City to a Jewish family with roots in the garment trade. His father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and the young Richard grew up surrounded by fashion, fabric, and the rhythms of commerce. His mother, Anna, kept elegant photo […]
Read MoreSteve McCurry
Steve McCurry was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of the city. He studied film and history at Pennsylvania State University, where he also began working for the student newspaper and discovered a passion for visual storytelling. After graduating, he worked briefly at a newspaper before deciding to pursue […]
Read MoreHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, a small town east of Paris, into a wealthy family whose fortune derived from the textile trade. The eldest of five children, he grew up surrounded by culture and privilege, developing an early passion for the visual arts. As a young man he was drawn […]
Read MoreKaren Knorr
Karen Knorr was born in 1954 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to an American father and a Puerto Rican mother, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, before moving to England in the 1970s. This transnational upbringing gave her an outsider’s perspective on British culture that would prove invaluable when she began photographing the […]
Read MoreJim Goldberg
Jim Goldberg was born in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent his career developing a form of documentary photography that is at once deeply personal and rigorously engaged with questions of social justice, power, and representation. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his MFA, and it was in […]
Read MoreMan Ray
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, the eldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had recently arrived in the United States. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was seven, and it was in New York that the young Emmanuel — who would adopt the name Man Ray around 1912 — first […]
Read MoreMargaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on 14 June 1904, the daughter of an engineer-inventor father and a progressive, intellectually ambitious mother who encouraged her daughter’s curiosity about the natural and mechanical world. Her father, Joseph White, worked in the printing industry and took young Margaret to factories and foundries, instilling in her a […]
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