Marcel 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 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 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 MoreMarkéta Luskačová
Markéta Luskačová was born in Prague in 1944, during the final year of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in the post-war period, studied sociology and philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and it was through her sociological research that she first encountered the communities that would become the subject of her most […]
Read MoreMartin Parr (1952 – 2025)
Martin Parr has spent five decades turning his camera on the rituals, vanities, and absurdities of modern life, producing a body of work that is at once hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, he was introduced to photography by his grandfather, George Parr, an enthusiastic amateur whose influence steered the young […]
Read MoreMartine Franck
Martine Franck was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1938, into a cultured and cosmopolitan family. She grew up partly in Belgium and partly in England, where she attended school, before studying art history at the University of Madrid and the École du Louvre in Paris. Her early studies immersed her in the visual traditions of […]
Read MoreMary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark was born on March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a middle-class family with deep roots in the city. From an early age she showed an instinct for visual storytelling, drawn to painting and drawing before discovering the camera as a teenager. She studied painting and art history at the University of […]
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 MoreMiguel Rio Branco
Miguel Rio Branco was born in 1946 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands, to Brazilian diplomatic parents. His childhood was itinerant: he grew up in Portugal, Brazil, Switzerland, and the United States, an experience of constant displacement that gave him an outsider’s perspective on every place he inhabited. He studied at […]
Read MoreMinor White
Minor White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1908, and from his earliest years displayed a temperament drawn equally to science and to poetry. He studied botany at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1933, but the Depression left few opportunities in the sciences, and White turned instead to writing and to the camera. His […]
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