Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1965, and grew up in a family that valued the arts without being part of the art world. She studied at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she began to develop the practice that […]
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 MoreNobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in the Minowa district of Tokyo, near the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, and the geography of his birth would prove prophetic. He grew up in a neighbourhood saturated with the history of desire, entertainment, and the floating world, and from his earliest years he absorbed the visual culture of a […]
Read MoreRichard Billingham
Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham and grew up in a council tower block in the Cradley Heath area of the Black Country, in the industrial West Midlands. His father, Ray, was an alcoholic who brewed his own drink and spent most of his time confined to the flat. His mother, Liz, was […]
Read MoreOtto Snoek
Otto Snoek is a Dutch contemporary photographer whose work occupies a distinctive space between documentary observation and poetic interpretation. Working primarily in the Netherlands, Snoek brings to the familiar landscapes, interiors, and domestic scenes of his home country an eye that is simultaneously precise and dreamlike, finding in the flat Dutch terrain and its distinctive […]
Read MoreRichard Kalvar
Richard Kalvar was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up with an instinctive sense of the comedy embedded in human behaviour. He studied English literature at Cornell University, where he developed the literary sensibility — the ear for irony, the eye for the telling detail — that would come to distinguish 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 MoreRineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, a small town in the southern Netherlands, and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. For the first decade of her career, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, producing competent but unremarkable work for magazines and corporate clients. The transformation that would make her […]
Read MorePatrick Zachmann
Patrick Zachmann was born in 1955 in Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb south of Paris, into a family whose Jewish heritage had been obscured by the traumas of the Second World War. His grandparents had survived the Holocaust, but the family seldom spoke of their origins, and Zachmann grew up in an atmosphere of deliberate forgetting. This […]
Read MoreRobert Capa
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, the son of a Jewish tailor. As a teenager he became involved in left-wing politics, and at seventeen, threatened with arrest by the authoritarian Hungarian government, he fled to Berlin. He enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and found work in a darkroom, beginning […]
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