Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut, the third of six children in a military family. Her father, Samuel Leibovitz, was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and the family moved frequently throughout her childhood — from Connecticut to various bases across the country and overseas. This itinerant […]
Read MoreAugust Sander
August Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, a small mining town in the Siegerland region of Germany, the son of a mine carpenter who worked the local ore deposits. The boy grew up in a landscape shaped by heavy industry and rural tradition, and his earliest understanding of the world was formed by the […]
Read MoreBerenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott was born on 17 July 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, and grew up in circumstances that were anything but auspicious for a future artist. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was raised in difficult conditions. Fiercely independent from an early age, she left Ohio as soon as she was able, moving […]
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.
Read MoreDavid Bailey
David Royston Bailey was born in 1938 in Leytonstone, in the East End of London, into a working-class family that could scarcely have been further from the world of fashion, art, and celebrity that he would come to dominate. His father was a tailor’s cutter, his mother a machinist. Bailey was severely dyslexic at a […]
Read MoreFazal Sheikh
Fazal Sheikh was born in New York City in 1965 to a Kenyan father of South Asian descent and a Swiss-American mother. This multicultural heritage instilled in him from the beginning an awareness of the complexity of belonging and displacement, themes that would come to define his life’s work. He studied at Princeton University, where […]
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 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 MoreTerence Donovan
One of the legendary “Terrible Three” who revolutionised British fashion photography, Donovan brought cinematic drama, muscular energy, and a raw East End swagger to the studio.
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