Hippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard was born on 20 January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye, a small town in the Oise department of northern France. He moved to Paris as a young man and found steady employment as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a position he would hold for much of his life. But behind the unremarkable façade […]
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 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 MoreHelmar Lerski
Helmar Lerski was born Israel Schmuklerski in Strasbourg in 1871, when the city was under German administration. He grew up in Zürich, where he trained initially as a bank clerk before the theatre drew him away from conventional employment. In the 1890s he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Midwest, where he worked […]
Read MoreHelen Levitt
Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighbourhood whose streets and stoops would provide the template for her life’s work. She left school at an early age and found employment in the portrait studio of J. Florian Mitchell in the Bronx, […]
Read MoreHarvey Benge
Harvey Benge was born in 1944 in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and came to photography relatively late in life, after careers in science and business. He studied biochemistry at the University of Otago and later worked in research and commerce before turning to photography in the 1990s. This unconventional path — arriving at art through […]
Read MoreHarry Callahan
Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent his early adulthood working as a clerk at the Chrysler Corporation, a job that offered no hint of the extraordinary artistic career that lay ahead. He purchased his first camera in 1938 and joined the Detroit Photo Guild, a local amateur photography club, where […]
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 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 […]
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