John Schott
John Schott is among the least visible yet most conceptually rigorous of the photographers who participated in the landmark 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Born in 1944, Schott studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later at the Visual Studies Workshop, […]
Read MoreJudith Joy Ross
Judith Joy Ross was born in 1946 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining city in the northeastern part of the state. She has lived and worked in the same region for most of her life, and this rootedness — this commitment to a particular place and its people — is central to understanding her photographic […]
Read MoreKaren Knor
Karen Knorr was born in 1954 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to an American father and a Puerto Rican mother, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, before moving to England in the 1970s. This transnational upbringing gave her an outsider’s perspective on British culture that would prove invaluable when she began photographing the […]
Read MoreGordon Parks
Gordon Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a poor Black family living under the harsh realities of segregation. His father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a tenant farmer, and the family scraped by with little money and fewer opportunities. Yet even as a boy, Parks […]
Read MoreLauren Greenfield
Lauren Greenfield was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Angeles, a city whose culture of surfaces, aspiration, and reinvention would become the central subject of her life’s work. Her father was a professor and her mother worked in education, and the family lived in Venice Beach, a neighbourhood where affluence […]
Read MoreGregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a middle-class household whose domestic life would later provide the emotional substrate for much of his work. His father was a psychoanalyst who practised from the family home, and Crewdson has spoken of lying on the floor as a child, trying […]
Read MoreLee Miller
Lee Miller was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of Theodore Miller, an amateur photographer who introduced her to the camera at an early age. Her childhood was marked by a traumatic assault at the age of seven, an event whose long shadow would be felt throughout her life. She […]
Read MoreHarry Callahan
Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent his early adulthood working as a clerk at the Chrysler Corporation, a job that offered no hint of the extraordinary artistic career that lay ahead. He purchased his first camera in 1938 and joined the Detroit Photo Guild, a local amateur photography club, where […]
Read MoreLeonard Freed
Leonard Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. He grew up in a working-class neighbourhood where questions of identity, belonging, and social justice were not abstract concepts but the texture of daily life. After graduating from high school, he initially […]
Read MoreHelen Levitt
Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighbourhood whose streets and stoops would provide the template for her life’s work. She left school at an early age and found employment in the portrait studio of J. Florian Mitchell in the Bronx, […]
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