Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, a small industrial city in the Bergisches Land region of western Germany. He came of age in the 1980s, a period when the cultural energies of post-punk music, rave culture, and a newly assertive queer politics were reshaping European youth culture, and these forces would profoundly shape […]
Read MoreThomas Hoepker
Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936 and grew up during the devastation and reconstruction of postwar Germany. His grandfather, a portrait painter, gave him his first camera when he was a teenager, and by the time he was sixteen he had won first prize in a youth photography competition organised by a German […]
Read MoreYousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh was born on 23 December 1908 in Mardin, a city in the Armenian heartland of the Ottoman Empire, into a family that would soon be engulfed by one of the twentieth century’s great catastrophes. During the Armenian Genocide, the young Karsh witnessed violence and deprivation that scarred him for life. In 1924, at […]
Read MoreThomas Joshua Cooper
Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco in 1946 and raised in the American West, where the vast landscapes of California and the desert Southwest formed the earliest coordinates of his visual imagination. He studied at Humboldt State College in Northern California before undertaking graduate work at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, […]
Read MoreZoe Strauss
Zoe Strauss was born in 1970 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has remained rooted in the city throughout her life and career. She grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in South Philadelphia, and the landscapes of that environment — the row houses, vacant lots, corner stores, highway overpasses, and the people who inhabit them — became […]
Read MoreThomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in the small town of Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany. He grew up in a rural landscape of extraordinary visual quietness, a backdrop that would make the cool, analytical rigour of his later work all the more striking. In 1977, he enrolled at […]
Read MoreThomas Struth
Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, a small town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany. He grew up in the quiet, orderly landscape of the postwar Rhineland, a visual environment that would leave its mark on the measured, analytical quality of his mature work. In 1973, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie […]
Read MoreTimothy H. O’Sullivan
Timothy Henry O’Sullivan was born around 1840, most likely in New York City, though some accounts place his birth in Ireland, from which his parents had recently emigrated. Very little is known of his early life, and the scarcity of biographical detail has contributed to the somewhat mythic status he holds in the history of […]
Read MoreTodd Hido
Todd Hido was born in 1968 in Kent, Ohio, a small Midwestern town whose quiet streets, modest houses, and overcast skies would become the emotional landscape of his entire body of work. He grew up in a turbulent household, and the tensions of his childhood — the gap between the orderly exterior of suburban life […]
Read MoreTony Ray-Jones
Tony Ray-Jones was born Holroyd Antony Ray-Jones in 1941 in Wells, Somerset, and grew up in the small-town England that would become his greatest subject. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing before winning a scholarship to Yale University in 1961, where he studied under the legendary graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch and […]
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