Bernd & Hilla Becher
Bernd Becher was born in 1931 in Siegen, a small industrial city in the Rhineland region of western Germany, surrounded by the coal mines, steelworks, and ironworks that had shaped the economy and landscape of the region for over a century. As a child, he watched the industrial structures of his hometown begin to be […]
Read MoreBetween the Eyes – David Levi Strauss
From Amazon: David Levi Strauss is a writer whose visual and intellectual sensibilities are both acute and expansive. His trenchant writings on photography and photographers have been collected for this volume from a broad range of magazines, including Aperture, Artforum and The Nation. In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Strauss tackles subjects as diverse […]
Read MoreBill Brandt
Bill Brandt was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt on 3 May 1904 in Hamburg, Germany, into a prosperous family with British connections. His early life was marked by illness; he contracted tuberculosis as a young man and spent several years in a Swiss sanatorium, an experience of enforced solitude and observation that may have shaped his […]
Read MoreBilly Monk
Billy Monk was born in 1942 in Cape Town, South Africa, into the coloured community of the Cape Flats — the sprawling, impoverished townships to which non-white South Africans were increasingly confined under the apartheid system that had been formalised in law since 1948. His early life was hard, shaped by poverty, racial discrimination, and […]
Read MoreBrassaï
Brassaï was born Gyula Halász on September 9, 1899, in Brassó, Transylvania, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the Romanian city of Brașov. He would later take his pseudonym from the name of his birthplace — Brassaï meaning simply “from Brassó” — in a gesture that fused his identity with the place that […]
Read MoreBrian Griffin
Brian Griffin was born in 1948 in Birmingham, England, into a working-class family in the industrial heartland of the Midlands. His father worked in a factory, and the young Griffin grew up surrounded by the machinery, production lines, and manual labour that characterised post-war industrial Britain. This environment left an indelible mark on his imagination: […]
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 MoreCandida Höfer
Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, a small town northeast of Berlin, in the final years of the Second World War. She grew up in postwar Germany, a country engaged in the painful process of physical and cultural reconstruction, and the relationship between architecture, memory, and public life would come to define her […]
Read MoreCecil Beaton
The photographer who transformed portraiture into theatre, capturing royalty, Hollywood legends, and the devastation of war with an unmatched eye for elegance and drama.
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