Helmut 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 MoreJohn Scott
John Scott is a British documentary photographer whose work belongs to the tradition of sustained, community-based photographic practice that has been one of the most distinctive contributions of British photography to the wider medium. Working primarily in the towns, estates, and post-industrial landscapes of England, Scott has built a body of work characterised by a […]
Read MoreMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, a small town in Normandy, into a family of remarkable artistic accomplishment. His elder brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were both established artists; his sister Suzanne Duchamp would become a painter of note. The young Marcel studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from […]
Read MoreHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, a small town east of Paris, into a wealthy family whose fortune derived from the textile trade. The eldest of five children, he grew up surrounded by culture and privilege, developing an early passion for the visual arts. As a young man he was drawn […]
Read MoreJosef Koudelka
Josef Koudelka was born in 1938 in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague and trained as an aeronautical engineer, a profession he practised for several years while devoting every spare hour to photography. From the early 1960s he began photographing theatrical […]
Read MoreMark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city in the coal-mining region of the northeastern part of the state. He has lived and worked there for virtually his entire life, a fact that distinguishes him from nearly every other photographer of comparable stature. While his contemporaries roamed the world in […]
Read MoreHippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard was born on 20 January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye, a small town in the Oise department of northern France. He moved to Paris as a young man and found steady employment as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a position he would hold for much of his life. But behind the unremarkable façade […]
Read MoreJosef Sudek
Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in Kolín, a small town in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained as a bookbinder before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. In 1917, he was wounded on the Italian front and lost his right arm — a devastating injury for […]
Read MoreMark Neville
Mark Neville was born in London in 1966 and studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he developed the socially engaged photographic practice that would distinguish his career. Unlike photographers who observe communities from the outside and exhibit the resulting images in galleries far removed from the lives they […]
Read MoreIrving Penn
Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, the elder of two sons in a family of modest means. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, but it was Irving who first found his way into the visual arts. As a teenager he discovered […]
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