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 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 […]
Read MoreChristian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944, just days after the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation. His birth date was itself a kind of marker: he entered the world at the precise moment when France was beginning the long, painful process of reckoning with the trauma of war, collaboration, and the Holocaust. […]
Read MoreCindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in Huntington, Long Island, the youngest of five children in a middle-class suburban family. From an early age, she was fascinated by disguise and transformation: she would raid her mother’s wardrobe, experiment with make-up, and spend hours in front of the […]
Read MoreDuane Michals
Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]
Read MoreEd Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]
Read MoreEd van der Elsken
Ed van der Elsken was born in 1925 in Amsterdam, into a middle-class family that offered little encouragement for artistic ambitions. He studied sculpture briefly at the city’s academy of art before turning to photography, a medium that suited his restless, confrontational temperament far better than the slow deliberation of working in three dimensions. In […]
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 MoreHans Eijkelboom
Hans Eijkelboom was born in 1949 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and came of age during a period when the boundaries between fine art and photography, between conceptual practice and documentary tradition, were being radically redrawn. He studied at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Arnhem and emerged in the early 1970s as a conceptual artist […]
Read More