Alec Soth
Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has remained rooted in the Upper Midwest throughout his career — a fact that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries in contemporary art photography and that deeply informs the character of his work. He studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, […]
Read MoreAlex Webb
Alex Webb was born in 1952 in San Francisco and raised in New England, the son of a diplomat. His early exposure to different cultures through his father’s career planted the seeds of a lifelong fascination with the borderlands between worlds — geographical, cultural, and psychological. He first picked up a camera as a teenager […]
Read MoreBruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson was born in 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, a leafy suburb west of Chicago. He discovered photography at the age of ten, setting up a darkroom in his mother’s basement and teaching himself to develop prints. By his mid-teens he was already winning local photography competitions, and his precocious talent earned him a […]
Read MoreBruce Gilden
Bruce Gilden was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a father who worked in the garment district and a mother he would later describe as difficult and domineering. He grew up in the working-class streets of Brooklyn, absorbing the visual cacophony, the confrontational energy, and the unapologetic theatricality of New York […]
Read MoreChris Killip
Chris Killip was born in 1946 on the Isle of Man, a small island in the Irish Sea whose isolation and self-contained culture shaped his early understanding of community and place. His father ran a pub, and the young Killip left school at sixteen with no particular direction. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, […]
Read MoreConstantine Manos
Constantine Manos was born in 1934 in Columbia, South Carolina, to Greek immigrant parents who ran a small business in the heart of the American South. His connection to two cultures — the warmth and ritual of his Greek heritage and the sprawling, unpredictable energy of American life — would define his photographic vision. He […]
Read MoreDavid Hurn
David Hurn was born in 1934 in Cardiff, Wales, and grew up with little sense that photography would become his life’s work. He attended a boarding school in Somerset where he was, by his own account, an indifferent student, and he drifted through his early twenties without a fixed purpose. His conversion to photography came […]
Read MoreElliott Erwitt
Elliott Erwitt was born Elio Romano Erwitz in Paris in 1928 to Russian Jewish émigré parents. His early childhood was spent in Milan, Italy, before his family emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling first in New York and then in Los Angeles. It was in Hollywood, of all places, that the young Erwitt […]
Read MoreGilles Peress
Gilles Peress was born in 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, and grew up in a France still haunted by the memory of occupation and collaboration. He studied political science and philosophy at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the Université de Vincennes, an intellectual formation that would profoundly shape his approach to […]
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 […]
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