Garry 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 MoreGordon Parks
Gordon Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a poor Black family living under the harsh realities of segregation. His father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a tenant farmer, and the family scraped by with little money and fewer opportunities. Yet even as a boy, Parks […]
Read MoreHarry Callahan
Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent his early adulthood working as a clerk at the Chrysler Corporation, a job that offered no hint of the extraordinary artistic career that lay ahead. He purchased his first camera in 1938 and joined the Detroit Photo Guild, a local amateur photography club, where […]
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 MoreHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, a small town east of Paris, into a wealthy family whose fortune derived from the textile trade. The eldest of five children, he grew up surrounded by culture and privilege, developing an early passion for the visual arts. As a young man he was drawn […]
Read MoreIrving Penn
Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, the elder of two sons in a family of modest means. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, but it was Irving who first found his way into the visual arts. As a teenager he discovered […]
Read MoreLee Miller
Lee Miller was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of Theodore Miller, an amateur photographer who introduced her to the camera at an early age. Her childhood was marked by a traumatic assault at the age of seven, an event whose long shadow would be felt throughout her life. She […]
Read MoreMargaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on 14 June 1904, the daughter of an engineer-inventor father and a progressive, intellectually ambitious mother who encouraged her daughter’s curiosity about the natural and mechanical world. Her father, Joseph White, worked in the printing industry and took young Margaret to factories and foundries, instilling in her a […]
Read MoreRichard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born on 15 May 1923 in New York City to a Jewish family with roots in the garment trade. His father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and the young Richard grew up surrounded by fashion, fabric, and the rhythms of commerce. His mother, Anna, kept elegant photo […]
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 […]
Read More