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 MoreJudith Joy Ross
Judith Joy Ross was born in 1946 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining city in the northeastern part of the state. She has lived and worked in the same region for most of her life, and this rootedness — this commitment to a particular place and its people — is central to understanding her photographic […]
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 MoreGillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England, and grew up in the city’s suburbs during a period of post-industrial decline and social upheaval. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 1990 as part of a generation of British artists — including Damien Hirst, […]
Read MoreJacques Henri Lartigue
Jacques Henri Lartigue was born on 13 June 1894 in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, into a wealthy and indulgent family that provided him with both the leisure and the equipment to begin photographing at an astonishingly early age. His father, Henri Lartigue, was a prosperous businessman and an enthusiastic amateur photographer who gave Jacques […]
Read MoreJulian Germain
Julian Germain was born in 1962 in England and studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London. From the outset of his career, he distinguished himself from the prevailing currents of British art photography by his commitment to collaborative, long-term projects that prioritised human relationships over aesthetic display. While many of his contemporaries […]
Read MoreMark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city in the coal-mining region of the northeastern part of the state. He has lived and worked there for virtually his entire life, a fact that distinguishes him from nearly every other photographer of comparable stature. While his contemporaries roamed the world in […]
Read MoreBarbara Norfleet
Barbara Paine Norfleet was born in 1926 in Lakewood, New Jersey, into the very world of American privilege that would later become the central subject of her photographic work. She grew up in comfortable, educated surroundings and attended Bryn Mawr College, one of the elite women’s institutions of the American Northeast, where she studied the […]
Read MoreClaude Cahun
Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in 1894 in Nantes, France, into a prominent Jewish intellectual family. Her uncle was the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, and her father was the publisher of a regional newspaper. The milieu in which she grew up was one of letters, ideas, and cultural ambition, and from an […]
Read MoreDuane Michals
Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]
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