Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, a city in the industrial heartland of Canada’s Niagara region. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants, and his father worked at the local General Motors plant — a detail of biography that would prove formative, for it was in the vast, roaring factories and the scarred […]
Read MoreEadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England, a market town on the outskirts of London. He emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in San Francisco around 1855, where he worked initially as a bookseller and publisher’s agent. The circumstances of his transformation from a […]
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 MoreDoug DuBois
Doug DuBois is an American photographer whose practice is defined by the depth and duration of his engagement with his subjects. Where many photographers pass through communities, extracting images and moving on, DuBois commits to relationships that extend over years, sometimes decades, building a body of work that earns its intimacy through sustained presence and […]
Read MoreDorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]
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 […]
Read MoreDon McCullin
Donald McCullin was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, a working-class district of north London that would shape his sensibility as profoundly as any battlefield. His father was a poor man who suffered from chronic asthma, and the family lived in conditions of real deprivation. McCullin grew up amid the bombsites and rubble of wartime […]
Read MoreDirck Halstead
Dirck Halstead was born in 1936 in Huntington, New York, and began his photographic career at an astonishingly young age. At fifteen, he was already selling photographs to local newspapers, and by the time he was seventeen, he had talked his way into covering the Guatemalan revolution of 1954 for United Press International, becoming one […]
Read MoreDavid Hurn
David Hurn was born in 1934 in Cardiff, Wales, and grew up with little sense that photography would become his life’s work. He attended a boarding school in Somerset where he was, by his own account, an indifferent student, and he drifted through his early twenties without a fixed purpose. His conversion to photography came […]
Read MoreDavid Goldblatt
David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, a gold-mining town on the Witwatersrand in South Africa, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who ran a small clothing shop. He grew up in the shadow of the mines whose wealth had built the region and whose labour practices — the systematic exploitation of black workers under […]
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