Sally Mann
Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, the daughter of Robert Munger, a general practitioner with a deep love of literature and the natural world, and Elizabeth Evans Munger, a woman of fierce intelligence and quiet reserve. She grew up on the family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a landscape of rolling hills, […]
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 […]
Read MorePhilip-Lorca diCorcia
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, into an Italian-American family. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later received his MFA from Yale University in 1979, where he studied under Tod Papageorge and was exposed to the conceptual approaches to photography that were beginning to reshape […]
Read MoreSaul Leiter
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923, the eldest son of a distinguished Talmudic scholar who fully expected his boy to follow him into the rabbinate. Leiter was a gifted student of religious texts, but from an early age he found himself drawn not to scripture but to painting. His mother gave him […]
Read MoreMitch Epstein
Mitch Epstein was born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Connecticut River whose industrial history would prove unexpectedly relevant to the work that would define his career decades later. His father ran a furniture store in the city, and Epstein grew up surrounded by the textures of a declining New […]
Read MoreRalph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Normal, Illinois, a small college town whose name would prove ironically apt for an artist whose life’s work was devoted to exploring the uncanny spaces between the normal and the strange. He showed no particular artistic inclination as a young man, serving in the United States Navy […]
Read MoreShirley Baker
Shirley Baker was born in Salford in 1932, the daughter of a factory worker in one of the great industrial cities of northern England. She grew up in the terraced streets and back-to-back houses that would later become the central subjects of her photographic work, and she never lost the intimate knowledge of working-class life […]
Read MoreNadar
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was born in Paris in 1820 and would become known to the world simply as Nadar — a name he adopted in his youth and that would come to stand for an entire era of French cultural life. Before he ever picked up a camera, Nadar had already established himself as a journalist, […]
Read MoreRaphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta was born in Paris in 1980 and grew up in a cultural environment that encouraged both scientific curiosity and artistic ambition. He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, one of France’s most rigorous institutions for photographic education, where he developed the technical mastery that would become a hallmark of his practice. From […]
Read MoreSophie Calle
Sophie Calle was born in Paris in 1953, the daughter of a prominent art collector and oncologist. She spent her early adulthood travelling — seven years wandering through the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere — before returning to Paris in the late 1970s with no particular plan and no formal artistic training. What she did […]
Read More