Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley was born in 1977 in Ramsey, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children in an Irish-Catholic family. He grew up skateboarding and immersed in the punk and hardcore music scenes, influences that would profoundly shape his visual sensibility. He studied graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he began […]
Read MoreRussell Lee
Russell Werner Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903, into a comfortable middle-class family. He studied chemical engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 and working briefly in the roofing industry. It was an unlikely beginning for a man who would become one of America’s most prolific and compassionate documentary photographers. Lee […]
Read MoreRoni Horn
Roni Horn was born in New York City in 1955 and grew up with an early sensitivity to the instability of perception, the way that things that appear identical can reveal themselves as fundamentally different depending on how and when they are encountered. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her […]
Read MoreRobert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, a middle-class neighbourhood in Queens, New York, the third of six children in a Catholic family. He studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he absorbed the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and the Pop artists, and where he first […]
Read MoreRobert Capa
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, the son of a Jewish tailor. As a teenager he became involved in left-wing politics, and at seventeen, threatened with arrest by the authoritarian Hungarian government, he fled to Berlin. He enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and found work in a darkroom, beginning […]
Read MoreRobert Adams
Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, and moved with his family to Colorado when he was a boy. The landscapes of the American West — the immense skies, the mountains, the plains that seemed to promise limitless space and possibility — shaped his sensibility from childhood. He studied English literature at […]
Read MoreRineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, a small town in the southern Netherlands, and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. For the first decade of her career, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, producing competent but unremarkable work for magazines and corporate clients. The transformation that would make her […]
Read MoreRichard Kalvar
Richard Kalvar was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up with an instinctive sense of the comedy embedded in human behaviour. He studied English literature at Cornell University, where he developed the literary sensibility — the ear for irony, the eye for the telling detail — that would come to distinguish his […]
Read MoreRichard Billingham
Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham and grew up in a council tower block in the Cradley Heath area of the Black Country, in the industrial West Midlands. His father, Ray, was an alcoholic who brewed his own drink and spent most of his time confined to the flat. His mother, Liz, was […]
Read MoreRichard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born on 15 May 1923 in New York City to a Jewish family with roots in the garment trade. His father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and the young Richard grew up surrounded by fashion, fabric, and the rhythms of commerce. His mother, Anna, kept elegant photo […]
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