Robert 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 […]
Read MoreRené Burri
René Burri was born in Zurich in 1933 and grew up in a Switzerland that, for all its neutrality, was surrounded by the convulsions of the Second World War. He studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under Hans Finsler, a pioneer of the New Photography whose emphasis on formal rigour and clean, […]
Read MoreRed Saunders
Red Saunders was born in London in 1945, into the post-war atmosphere of reconstruction and political hope that would shape his lifelong commitment to radical politics and popular culture. He came of age in the 1960s, absorbing the energies of the counterculture, and established himself as a photographer working across music, theatre, and editorial commissions. […]
Read MoreRaphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta was born in Paris in 1980 and grew up in a cultural environment that encouraged both scientific curiosity and artistic ambition. He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, one of France’s most rigorous institutions for photographic education, where he developed the technical mastery that would become a hallmark of his practice. From […]
Read MoreRalph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Normal, Illinois, a small college town whose name would prove ironically apt for an artist whose life’s work was devoted to exploring the uncanny spaces between the normal and the strange. He showed no particular artistic inclination as a young man, serving in the United States Navy […]
Read More