Berenice 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 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 MoreEadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England, a market town on the outskirts of London. He emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in San Francisco around 1855, where he worked initially as a bookseller and publisher’s agent. The circumstances of his transformation from a […]
Read MoreBernd & 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 MoreCorinne Day
Corinne Day was born in 1962 in Ealing, west London, and grew up in a modest working-class household far removed from the world of high fashion that she would one day transform. She left school with few qualifications and spent her early twenties drifting through a series of jobs, including a stint as a courier […]
Read MoreEdward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, a city in the industrial heartland of Canada’s Niagara region. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants, and his father worked at the local General Motors plant — a detail of biography that would prove formative, for it was in the vast, roaring factories and the scarred […]
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 MoreDaido Moriyama
Daidō Moriyama was born in 1938 in the industrial city of Ikeda, in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. His childhood was shaped by the upheavals of wartime and postwar reconstruction, and the restless energy of a nation remaking itself would become one of the defining currents of his art. As a young man, Moriyama had no particular […]
Read MoreEd Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]
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 More