Chris Verene
Chris Verene was born in 1969 in Galesburg, Illinois, a small railroad town in the western part of the state whose gradual economic decline and resilient community life would become the central subject of his photographic career. Galesburg, with its fading Main Street storefronts, its working-class neighbourhoods, and its population of ordinary Americans living lives […]
Read MoreDirck Halstead
Dirck Halstead was born in 1936 in Huntington, New York, and began his photographic career at an astonishingly young age. At fifteen, he was already selling photographs to local newspapers, and by the time he was seventeen, he had talked his way into covering the Guatemalan revolution of 1954 for United Press International, becoming one […]
Read MoreFrank Gohlke
Frank Gohlke was born in 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas, a small city on the edge of the Great Plains whose flat, windswept terrain and sparse, functional architecture would become the foundational landscape of his artistic imagination. He grew up amid the grain elevators, oil derricks, and wide horizons of North Texas, absorbing a sense […]
Read MoreChrister Strömholm
Christer Strömholm was born in 1918 in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family marked by disruption and restlessness. His parents separated when he was young, and he was raised by relatives, an early experience of displacement that would colour his entire life and art. As a young man, he studied painting at the art academies of […]
Read MoreDon 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 […]
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