Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1965, and grew up in a family that valued the arts without being part of the art world. She studied at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she began to develop the practice that […]
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 MorePaul Graham
Paul Graham was born in 1956 in Stafford, a quiet market town in the English Midlands, and grew up in an era when British photography was largely divided between the black-and-white social documentary tradition and the colour work of commercial advertising. Graham would spend his career dismantling that division, demonstrating through book after book that […]
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 MorePaul Outerbridge
Paul Outerbridge was born in 1896 in New York City, into a family of comfortable means that encouraged his early interest in art and design. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and served briefly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps and the United States Army during the First World War. Upon […]
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 MoreMary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark was born on March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a middle-class family with deep roots in the city. From an early age she showed an instinct for visual storytelling, drawn to painting and drawing before discovering the camera as a teenager. She studied painting and art history at the University of […]
Read MorePaul Seawright
Paul Seawright was born in 1965 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the very beginning of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. He grew up in a working-class Protestant community on the north side of the city, in streets where the daily texture of life was shaped by sectarian division, military […]
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 […]
Read MoreMichael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War, into a city that was being reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. He grew up in West Berlin, in the shadow of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 onwards, and it is impossible to understand his […]
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