Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was born on 20 February 1902 in San Francisco, California, the only child of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman whose family fortune had been built in the timber industry, and Olive Bray Adams. The great earthquake of 1906 threw the young Adams against a garden wall, breaking his nose and leaving him […]
Read MoreAaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind was born on December 4, 1903, in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled on the Lower East Side. He grew up in a household where education was prized but resources were modest, and his early intellectual formation owed more to the public library system than to any formal artistic […]
Read MoreAlec Soth
Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has remained rooted in the Upper Midwest throughout his career — a fact that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries in contemporary art photography and that deeply informs the character of his work. He studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, […]
Read MoreAlex Webb
Alex Webb was born in 1952 in San Francisco and raised in New England, the son of a diplomat. His early exposure to different cultures through his father’s career planted the seeds of a lifelong fascination with the borderlands between worlds — geographical, cultural, and psychological. He first picked up a camera as a teenager […]
Read MoreAlfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the eldest son of German-Jewish immigrants who had prospered in the wool trade. His father, Edward Stieglitz, was a cultured man who valued the arts and provided his children with a privileged upbringing that included private education and, crucially, an extended period of […]
Read MoreAlfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, and grew up during a period of profound political upheaval that would fundamentally shape his understanding of the relationship between images, power, and human suffering. He studied film and architecture at the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura and the Universidad de Chile, a dual formation that equipped […]
Read MoreAmak Mahmoodian
Amak Mahmoodian was born in Isfahan, Iran, one of the great cultural capitals of the Persian world, a city of mosques, bridges, and bazaars that would remain a powerful presence in her imagination long after she left. She grew up within a culture that placed great value on poetry, craftsmanship, and visual beauty, but also […]
Read MoreAnders Petersen
Anders Petersen was born in 1944 in Solna, a suburb of Stockholm, and grew up in a middle-class Swedish household that gave little indication of the raw, transgressive world he would later make his own as a photographer. As a young man, he was restless and uncertain of his direction, drifting through various jobs and […]
Read MoreSebastião Salgado
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born on 8 February 1944 in Aimorés, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, surrounded by the lush Atlantic Forest that would, decades later, become central to his life’s mission. The son of a cattle rancher, he grew up on a farm in the Rio Doce valley, one […]
Read MoreAugust Sander
August Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, a small mining town in the Siegerland region of Germany, the son of a mine carpenter who worked the local ore deposits. The boy grew up in a landscape shaped by heavy industry and rural tradition, and his earliest understanding of the world was formed by the […]
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