Red Saunders
Red Saunders was born in London in 1945, into the post-war atmosphere of reconstruction and political hope that would shape his lifelong commitment to radical politics and popular culture. He came of age in the 1960s, absorbing the energies of the counterculture, and established himself as a photographer working across music, theatre, and editorial commissions. […]
Read MoreRené Burri
René Burri was born in Zurich in 1933 and grew up in a Switzerland that, for all its neutrality, was surrounded by the convulsions of the Second World War. He studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under Hans Finsler, a pioneer of the New Photography whose emphasis on formal rigour and clean, […]
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 MoreRichard Billingham
Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham and grew up in a council tower block in the Cradley Heath area of the Black Country, in the industrial West Midlands. His father, Ray, was an alcoholic who brewed his own drink and spent most of his time confined to the flat. His mother, Liz, was […]
Read MoreRichard Kalvar
Richard Kalvar was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up with an instinctive sense of the comedy embedded in human behaviour. He studied English literature at Cornell University, where he developed the literary sensibility — the ear for irony, the eye for the telling detail — that would come to distinguish his […]
Read MoreRineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, a small town in the southern Netherlands, and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. For the first decade of her career, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, producing competent but unremarkable work for magazines and corporate clients. The transformation that would make her […]
Read MoreRobert Adams
Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937, and moved with his family to Colorado when he was a boy. The landscapes of the American West — the immense skies, the mountains, the plains that seemed to promise limitless space and possibility — shaped his sensibility from childhood. He studied English literature at […]
Read MoreRobert Capa
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, the son of a Jewish tailor. As a teenager he became involved in left-wing politics, and at seventeen, threatened with arrest by the authoritarian Hungarian government, he fled to Berlin. He enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and found work in a darkroom, beginning […]
Read MoreRobert Frank
Robert Frank arrived in the United States in 1947 with a Swiss passport, a working knowledge of several European photographic traditions, and an eye that would transform the medium forever. Born in Zürich in 1924 to a Jewish family of German descent, he had apprenticed with photographers in Switzerland and learned the discipline of careful, […]
Read MoreRobert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, a middle-class neighbourhood in Queens, New York, the third of six children in a Catholic family. He studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he absorbed the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and the Pop artists, and where he first […]
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