Jacob Aue Sobol
Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen in 1976 and grew up in Denmark with an early awareness that he wanted to engage the world through direct, physical experience rather than from a comfortable distance. He studied at the European Film College in the mid-1990s, where he first picked up a camera, and subsequently enrolled […]
Read MoreJim Goldberg
Jim Goldberg was born in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent his career developing a form of documentary photography that is at once deeply personal and rigorously engaged with questions of social justice, power, and representation. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his MFA, and it was in […]
Read MoreJosef Koudelka
Josef Koudelka was born in 1938 in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague and trained as an aeronautical engineer, a profession he practised for several years while devoting every spare hour to photography. From the early 1960s he began photographing theatrical […]
Read MoreLeonard Freed
Leonard Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. He grew up in a working-class neighbourhood where questions of identity, belonging, and social justice were not abstract concepts but the texture of daily life. After graduating from high school, he initially […]
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 MoreMartin Parr (1952 – 2025)
Martin Parr has spent five decades turning his camera on the rituals, vanities, and absurdities of modern life, producing a body of work that is at once hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, he was introduced to photography by his grandfather, George Parr, an enthusiastic amateur whose influence steered the young […]
Read MoreMartine Franck
Martine Franck was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1938, into a cultured and cosmopolitan family. She grew up partly in Belgium and partly in England, where she attended school, before studying art history at the University of Madrid and the École du Louvre in Paris. Her early studies immersed her in the visual traditions of […]
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 MorePhilip Jones Griffiths
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in 1936 in Rhuddlan, a small town in Denbighshire, North Wales, the son of a local government official. He grew up speaking Welsh, absorbing the values of a tight-knit community that prized education, nonconformist religion, and a deep suspicion of imperial authority — values that would prove remarkably durable when […]
Read MoreRené Burri
René Burri was born in Zurich in 1933 and grew up in a Switzerland that, for all its neutrality, was surrounded by the convulsions of the Second World War. He studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under Hans Finsler, a pioneer of the New Photography whose emphasis on formal rigour and clean, […]
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