Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1965, and grew up in a family that valued the arts without being part of the art world. She studied at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she began to develop the practice that […]
Read MoreSusan Lipper
Susan Lipper was born in New York in 1953 and came to photography after studying at Yale University, where she completed an MFA under the guidance of Tod Papageorge. Her education at Yale placed her within one of the most rigorous programmes in American photography, but her work would develop in directions that departed significantly […]
Read MoreW. Eugene Smith
William Eugene Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1918, and from his earliest years demonstrated an intensity of purpose that would define both the brilliance and the turbulence of his life. His father, a grain dealer, committed suicide when Eugene was eighteen, a trauma that left a lasting mark on the young man. Smith […]
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 MoreStephen Gill
Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971 and grew up in the west of England before moving to London, where he would spend nearly two decades engaged in one of the most sustained and inventive photographic explorations of a single place that contemporary photography has produced. Gill’s early interest in photography was shaped by […]
Read MoreSophie Calle
Sophie Calle was born in Paris in 1953, the daughter of a prominent art collector and oncologist. She spent her early adulthood travelling — seven years wandering through the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere — before returning to Paris in the late 1970s with no particular plan and no formal artistic training. What she did […]
Read MoreShirley Baker
Shirley Baker was born in Salford in 1932, the daughter of a factory worker in one of the great industrial cities of northern England. She grew up in the terraced streets and back-to-back houses that would later become the central subjects of her photographic work, and she never lost the intimate knowledge of working-class life […]
Read MoreSaul Leiter
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923, the eldest son of a distinguished Talmudic scholar who fully expected his boy to follow him into the rabbinate. Leiter was a gifted student of religious texts, but from an early age he found himself drawn not to scripture but to painting. His mother gave him […]
Read MoreSally Mann
Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, the daughter of Robert Munger, a general practitioner with a deep love of literature and the natural world, and Elizabeth Evans Munger, a woman of fierce intelligence and quiet reserve. She grew up on the family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a landscape of rolling hills, […]
Read MoreSally Eauclaire
Sally Eauclaire emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one of the most perceptive and influential voices in the critical discourse surrounding colour photography at a moment when the medium was undergoing a profound transformation. For decades, serious art photography had been almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Colour was dismissed by the […]
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