Don McCullin
Donald McCullin was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, a working-class district of north London that would shape his sensibility as profoundly as any battlefield. His father was a poor man who suffered from chronic asthma, and the family lived in conditions of real deprivation. McCullin grew up amid the bombsites and rubble of wartime […]
Read MoreFrederick Sommer
Frederick Sommer was born in 1905 in Angri, a small town near Naples in southern Italy. His father was a Swiss-German landscape architect, and the family moved frequently during Sommer’s childhood, living in Italy, Brazil, and eventually the United States. This itinerant upbringing gave him an unusually cosmopolitan perspective and a fluency in multiple languages […]
Read MoreAnthony Hernandez
Anthony Hernandez was born in 1947 in Los Angeles, the city that would become the singular subject of his life’s work. Raised in a working-class Mexican-American family, he grew up in the neighbourhoods of East Los Angeles and witnessed firsthand the social stratification, racial tension, and relentless urban transformation that would define his photographic vision. […]
Read MoreChristian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944, just days after the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation. His birth date was itself a kind of marker: he entered the world at the precise moment when France was beginning the long, painful process of reckoning with the trauma of war, collaboration, and the Holocaust. […]
Read MoreDonovan Wylie
Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971, at the very start of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. Growing up in a city defined by division, surveillance, and the constant presence of military infrastructure, Wylie developed an acute sensitivity to the ways in which political power inscribes itself upon […]
Read MoreGeorge Platt Lynes
George Platt Lynes was born in 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey, into a comfortable, cultured family. His father was a minister and his mother a woman of refined literary tastes who encouraged her son’s early interest in the arts. As a teenager, Lynes was already corresponding with Gertrude Stein and had begun publishing a […]
Read MoreAnton Bruehl
Anton Bruehl was born in 1900 in the small outback town of Hawker, South Australia, the son of German immigrants who had settled in the arid farmlands of the Flinders Ranges. His early life in the Australian bush gave little indication of the glamorous career that lay ahead. As a young man he trained as […]
Read MoreChristopher Anderson
Christopher Anderson was born in 1970 in western Canada and raised in Texas. His path to photography was not immediate; he spent time drifting, working odd jobs, and slowly discovering that the camera offered him a way of engaging with the world that nothing else could match. His early work as a photojournalist took him […]
Read MoreDorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]
Read MoreGilles Peress
Gilles Peress was born in 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, and grew up in a France still haunted by the memory of occupation and collaboration. He studied political science and philosophy at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the Université de Vincennes, an intellectual formation that would profoundly shape his approach to […]
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