Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind was born on December 4, 1903, in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled on the Lower East Side. He grew up in a household where education was prized but resources were modest, and his early intellectual formation owed more to the public library system than to any formal artistic […]
Read MoreAlec Soth
Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has remained rooted in the Upper Midwest throughout his career — a fact that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries in contemporary art photography and that deeply informs the character of his work. He studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, […]
Read MoreAlex Webb
Alex Webb was born in 1952 in San Francisco and raised in New England, the son of a diplomat. His early exposure to different cultures through his father’s career planted the seeds of a lifelong fascination with the borderlands between worlds — geographical, cultural, and psychological. He first picked up a camera as a teenager […]
Read MoreAlfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the eldest son of German-Jewish immigrants who had prospered in the wool trade. His father, Edward Stieglitz, was a cultured man who valued the arts and provided his children with a privileged upbringing that included private education and, crucially, an extended period of […]
Read MoreAnsel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was born on 20 February 1902 in San Francisco, California, the only child of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman whose family fortune had been built in the timber industry, and Olive Bray Adams. The great earthquake of 1906 threw the young Adams against a garden wall, breaking his nose and leaving him […]
Read MoreAnnie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut, the third of six children in a military family. Her father, Samuel Leibovitz, was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and the family moved frequently throughout her childhood — from Connecticut to various bases across the country and overseas. This itinerant […]
Read MoreAndre Kertesz (1894 – 1985)
André Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1894, the second of three sons in a middle-class Jewish family. His father died when he was fourteen, and the young Kertész was raised largely by his mother and an uncle who encouraged his education but expected him to pursue a practical career. He took a position […]
Read MoreWilliam Eggleston (1939)
William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939 and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the heart of the cotton-growing Delta. His family belonged to the landed Southern aristocracy: his father was an engineer, his grandfather a prominent judge and plantation owner. Eggleston grew up in a world of slow afternoons, clapboard […]
Read MoreLee Friedlander (1934)
Lee Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, a small lumber town on the Pacific Northwest coast that offered little in the way of artistic stimulation but much in the way of American ordinariness. It was precisely this ordinariness, the clutter and texture of everyday life in the United States, that would become his […]
Read MoreLarry Clark (1943)
Larry Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1943, into a world that would become both the setting and the subject of his most important work. His mother worked as an itinerant baby photographer, travelling from door to door across the state to photograph infants and toddlers for their families. Clark accompanied her from a […]
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