W. 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 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 MoreThomas Joshua Cooper
Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco in 1946 and raised in the American West, where the vast landscapes of California and the desert Southwest formed the earliest coordinates of his visual imagination. He studied at Humboldt State College in Northern California before undertaking graduate work at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, […]
Read MoreTodd Hido
Todd Hido was born in 1968 in Kent, Ohio, a small Midwestern town whose quiet streets, modest houses, and overcast skies would become the emotional landscape of his entire body of work. He grew up in a turbulent household, and the tensions of his childhood — the gap between the orderly exterior of suburban life […]
Read MoreVivian Maier
Vivian Maier is the most remarkable photographic discovery of the twenty-first century. Born in New York City in 1926 to a French mother and an Austrian father, she spent significant portions of her childhood in the village of Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur in the French Alps, where her mother had family connections. This Franco-American upbringing gave her a […]
Read MoreWalker Evans
Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, the son of an advertising director whose restless ambitions kept the family moving through the Midwest. He grew up in suburban Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, attending a series of preparatory schools before enrolling at Williams College in Massachusetts. He was a voracious reader but a […]
Read MoreWalter Chappell
Walter Chappell was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925, into a world he would spend a lifetime attempting to see more deeply. From his earliest years he displayed an unusual sensitivity to the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest — the forests, coastline, and volcanic landscapes that surrounded him. After serving in the United States […]
Read MoreWeegee
Usher Fellig was born in 1899 in Lemberg, then part of Austria-Hungary and now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. His family moved briefly to Złoczew before emigrating to the United States in 1909, settling on New York’s Lower East Side amid the teeming immigrant tenements that would later become his photographic territory. The family was […]
Read MoreWilliam Christenberry
William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and raised in the rural landscape of Hale County, a place that would become the central subject and abiding obsession of his life’s work. His family had farmed the red clay soil of west-central Alabama for generations, and the tenant houses, country churches, roadside stores, and […]
Read MoreWilliam Klein
William Klein was born in 1926 in New York City, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who ran a clothing shop on the Upper West Side. He grew up tough and streetwise in a city that would become both his greatest subject and the antagonist against which he defined himself. A precocious student, he graduated […]
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