Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky was born on January 15, 1955, in Leipzig, in what was then East Germany, into a family of commercial photographers. His father, Willy Gursky, ran a successful advertising photography studio, and the young Andreas grew up surrounded by the tools and processes of the medium. The family moved to West Germany during his […]
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 […]
Read MoreGarry Winogrand (1928 – 1984)
Garry Winogrand was born on January 14, 1928, in the Bronx, New York, into a working-class Jewish family. His father worked in the leather goods trade, and the neighbourhood in which Winogrand grew up was dense, loud, and teeming with the kind of street-level human theatre that would later become the raw material of his […]
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 MoreRobert Frank
Robert Frank arrived in the United States in 1947 with a Swiss passport, a working knowledge of several European photographic traditions, and an eye that would transform the medium forever. Born in Zürich in 1924 to a Jewish family of German descent, he had apprenticed with photographers in Switzerland and learned the discipline of careful, […]
Read MoreDiane Arbus (1923 -1971)
Diane Arbus changed the possibilities of the photographic portrait forever. Born Diane Nemerov in 1923 to a wealthy Jewish family that owned Russeks, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store, she grew up insulated from the rougher textures of American life. That insulation became, paradoxically, the engine of her art. From an early age she felt […]
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