Thomas Hoepker
Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936 and grew up during the devastation and reconstruction of postwar Germany. His grandfather, a portrait painter, gave him his first camera when he was a teenager, and by the time he was sixteen he had won first prize in a youth photography competition organised by a German […]
Read MoreThomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in the small town of Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany. He grew up in a rural landscape of extraordinary visual quietness, a backdrop that would make the cool, analytical rigour of his later work all the more striking. In 1977, he enrolled at […]
Read MoreThomas Struth
Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, a small town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany. He grew up in the quiet, orderly landscape of the postwar Rhineland, a visual environment that would leave its mark on the measured, analytical quality of his mature work. In 1973, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie […]
Read MoreWolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, a small industrial city in the Bergisches Land region of western Germany. He came of age in the 1980s, a period when the cultural energies of post-punk music, rave culture, and a newly assertive queer politics were reshaping European youth culture, and these forces would profoundly shape […]
Read MoreMichael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War, into a city that was being reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. He grew up in West Berlin, in the shadow of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 onwards, and it is impossible to understand his […]
Read MoreOtto Steinert
Otto Steinert was born in 1915 in Saarbrücken, in the Saar region of Germany that would change national sovereignty several times during his lifetime. He studied medicine at the universities of Munich, Marburg, and Berlin, qualifying as a physician in 1939, and served as a military doctor during the Second World War. But photography had […]
Read MoreHelmut Newton
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. His father owned a button factory, and the young Helmut grew up in the comfortable bourgeois world of Weimar-era Berlin — a city of cabarets, cinema, and avant-garde art that would leave an indelible mark on his […]
Read MoreJoachim Schmid
Joachim Schmid was born in 1955 in Balingen, a small town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and has devoted his career to one of the most radical and sustained interrogations of photography’s nature and purpose ever undertaken. Since the early 1980s, working from Berlin, Schmid has produced an enormous body of work without ever — or almost […]
Read MoreBernd & Hilla Becher
Bernd Becher was born in 1931 in Siegen, a small industrial city in the Rhineland region of western Germany, surrounded by the coal mines, steelworks, and ironworks that had shaped the economy and landscape of the region for over a century. As a child, he watched the industrial structures of his hometown begin to be […]
Read MoreCandida Höfer
Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, a small town northeast of Berlin, in the final years of the Second World War. She grew up in postwar Germany, a country engaged in the painful process of physical and cultural reconstruction, and the relationship between architecture, memory, and public life would come to define her […]
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