Harvey Benge
Harvey Benge was born in 1944 in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and came to photography relatively late in life, after careers in science and business. He studied biochemistry at the University of Otago and later worked in research and commerce before turning to photography in the 1990s. This unconventional path — arriving at art through […]
Read MoreJohn Baldessari
John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border just south of San Diego. His father was a salvage dealer who had emigrated from Austria, and his mother was Danish. It was not a background that naturally led to the art world, and Baldessari’s path to becoming […]
Read MoreLua Ribeira
Lua Ribeira was born in Barcelona in 1986 and grew up in a city whose own traditions of street festival and communal spectacle would later find deep resonance in her photographic work. She studied fine art at the University of Barcelona before moving to the United Kingdom, where she completed a master’s degree in documentary […]
Read MoreHelen Levitt
Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighbourhood whose streets and stoops would provide the template for her life’s work. She left school at an early age and found employment in the portrait studio of J. Florian Mitchell in the Bronx, […]
Read MoreJohn Gossage
John Gossage was born in 1946 in New York City but has spent most of his working life in Washington, D.C., a city whose margins, neglected spaces, and transitional zones have provided the primary subject matter for one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary photography. He came to the medium young, studying […]
Read MoreMan Ray
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, the eldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had recently arrived in the United States. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was seven, and it was in New York that the young Emmanuel — who would adopt the name Man Ray around 1912 — first […]
Read MoreHelmar Lerski
Helmar Lerski was born Israel Schmuklerski in Strasbourg in 1871, when the city was under German administration. He grew up in Zürich, where he trained initially as a bank clerk before the theatre drew him away from conventional employment. In the 1890s he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Midwest, where he worked […]
Read MoreJohn Schott
John Schott is among the least visible yet most conceptually rigorous of the photographers who participated in the landmark 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Born in 1944, Schott studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later at the Visual Studies Workshop, […]
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 MoreHelmut 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 […]
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