Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has remained based in that city throughout his career, making it both his home and his primary subject. He studied art history at the University of British Columbia, completing a master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada movement, and subsequently spent time in London at […]
Read MoreHenry Wessel
Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up on the suburban East Coast before the landscape of the American West would claim him entirely. He studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 under […]
Read MoreGregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a middle-class household whose domestic life would later provide the emotional substrate for much of his work. His father was a psychoanalyst who practised from the family home, and Crewdson has spoken of lying on the floor as a child, trying […]
Read MoreHans Aarsman
Hans Aarsman was born in 1951 in Amsterdam, and his early career followed a conventional path for a Dutch documentary photographer of his generation. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and worked as a freelance photographer through the 1970s and 1980s, producing documentary images of Dutch life that appeared in newspapers and magazines. He […]
Read MoreHans Eijkelboom
Hans Eijkelboom was born in 1949 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and came of age during a period when the boundaries between fine art and photography, between conceptual practice and documentary tradition, were being radically redrawn. He studied at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Arnhem and emerged in the early 1970s as a conceptual artist […]
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 MoreHelmut Newton
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. His father owned a button factory, and the young Helmut grew up in the comfortable bourgeois world of Weimar-era Berlin — a city of cabarets, cinema, and avant-garde art that would leave an indelible mark on his […]
Read MoreEd Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]
Read MoreDuane Michals
Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]
Read MoreDonovan Wylie
Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971, at the very start of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. Growing up in a city defined by division, surveillance, and the constant presence of military infrastructure, Wylie developed an acute sensitivity to the ways in which political power inscribes itself upon […]
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