Stephen 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 […]
Read MoreRyan 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 More