Ken Grant
Ken Grant was born in 1967 in Liverpool, the son of a carpenter. He bought his first camera — a Polaroid — at the age of twelve and worked as a carpenter himself before studying photography under Martin Parr and Paul Graham at West Surrey College of Art and Design. Over the past three decades, […]
Read MoreZoe Strauss
Zoe Strauss was born in 1970 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has remained rooted in the city throughout her life and career. She grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in South Philadelphia, and the landscapes of that environment — the row houses, vacant lots, corner stores, highway overpasses, and the people who inhabit them — became […]
Read MoreYousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh was born on 23 December 1908 in Mardin, a city in the Armenian heartland of the Ottoman Empire, into a family that would soon be engulfed by one of the twentieth century’s great catastrophes. During the Armenian Genocide, the young Karsh witnessed violence and deprivation that scarred him for life. In 1924, at […]
Read MoreWolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, a small industrial city in the Bergisches Land region of western Germany. He came of age in the 1980s, a period when the cultural energies of post-punk music, rave culture, and a newly assertive queer politics were reshaping European youth culture, and these forces would profoundly shape […]
Read MoreWilliam Klein
William Klein was born in 1926 in New York City, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who ran a clothing shop on the Upper West Side. He grew up tough and streetwise in a city that would become both his greatest subject and the antagonist against which he defined himself. A precocious student, he graduated […]
Read MoreWilliam Christenberry
William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and raised in the rural landscape of Hale County, a place that would become the central subject and abiding obsession of his life’s work. His family had farmed the red clay soil of west-central Alabama for generations, and the tenant houses, country churches, roadside stores, and […]
Read MoreWeegee
Usher Fellig was born in 1899 in Lemberg, then part of Austria-Hungary and now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. His family moved briefly to Złoczew before emigrating to the United States in 1909, settling on New York’s Lower East Side amid the teeming immigrant tenements that would later become his photographic territory. The family was […]
Read MoreWalter Chappell
Walter Chappell was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925, into a world he would spend a lifetime attempting to see more deeply. From his earliest years he displayed an unusual sensitivity to the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest — the forests, coastline, and volcanic landscapes that surrounded him. After serving in the United States […]
Read MoreWalker Evans
Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, the son of an advertising director whose restless ambitions kept the family moving through the Midwest. He grew up in suburban Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, attending a series of preparatory schools before enrolling at Williams College in Massachusetts. He was a voracious reader but a […]
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