Dave Heath
Dave Heath was born in Philadelphia in 1931 and abandoned by his parents as an infant. He spent his childhood in a series of foster homes and orphanages, an experience of rejection and impermanence that would shape every aspect of his life and art. The loneliness of those early years became not merely the subject […]
Read MoreDavid Alan Harvey
David Alan Harvey was born in 1944 in San Francisco and grew up in Virginia, where his photographic life began remarkably early. At the age of eleven, he received a camera from his father and almost immediately began a long-term documentary project photographing an African American family in Norfolk, Virginia. This body of work, eventually […]
Read MoreDavid Bailey
David Royston Bailey was born in 1938 in Leytonstone, in the East End of London, into a working-class family that could scarcely have been further from the world of fashion, art, and celebrity that he would come to dominate. His father was a tailor’s cutter, his mother a machinist. Bailey was severely dyslexic at a […]
Read MoreDavid Goldblatt
David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, a gold-mining town on the Witwatersrand in South Africa, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who ran a small clothing shop. He grew up in the shadow of the mines whose wealth had built the region and whose labour practices — the systematic exploitation of black workers under […]
Read MoreDavid Hurn
David Hurn was born in 1934 in Cardiff, Wales, and grew up with little sense that photography would become his life’s work. He attended a boarding school in Somerset where he was, by his own account, an indifferent student, and he drifted through his early twenties without a fixed purpose. His conversion to photography came […]
Read MoreDiane Arbus (1923 -1971)
Diane Arbus changed the possibilities of the photographic portrait forever. Born Diane Nemerov in 1923 to a wealthy Jewish family that owned Russeks, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store, she grew up insulated from the rougher textures of American life. That insulation became, paradoxically, the engine of her art. From an early age she felt […]
Read MoreDirck Halstead
Dirck Halstead was born in 1936 in Huntington, New York, and began his photographic career at an astonishingly young age. At fifteen, he was already selling photographs to local newspapers, and by the time he was seventeen, he had talked his way into covering the Guatemalan revolution of 1954 for United Press International, becoming one […]
Read MoreDon McCullin
Donald McCullin was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, a working-class district of north London that would shape his sensibility as profoundly as any battlefield. His father was a poor man who suffered from chronic asthma, and the family lived in conditions of real deprivation. McCullin grew up amid the bombsites and rubble of wartime […]
Read MoreDonovan Wylie
Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971, at the very start of the period that would come to be known as the Troubles. Growing up in a city defined by division, surveillance, and the constant presence of military infrastructure, Wylie developed an acute sensitivity to the ways in which political power inscribes itself upon […]
Read MoreDorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]
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