William Christenberry
William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and raised in the rural landscape of Hale County, a place that would become the central subject and abiding obsession of his life’s work. His family had farmed the red clay soil of west-central Alabama for generations, and the tenant houses, country churches, roadside stores, and […]
Read MoreWilliam Eggleston (1939)
William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939 and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the heart of the cotton-growing Delta. His family belonged to the landed Southern aristocracy: his father was an engineer, his grandfather a prominent judge and plantation owner. Eggleston grew up in a world of slow afternoons, clapboard […]
Read MoreWilliam Klein
William Klein was born in 1926 in New York City, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who ran a clothing shop on the Upper West Side. He grew up tough and streetwise in a city that would become both his greatest subject and the antagonist against which he defined himself. A precocious student, he graduated […]
Read MoreWolfgang 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 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 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 […]
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