Mitch Epstein
Mitch Epstein was born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Connecticut River whose industrial history would prove unexpectedly relevant to the work that would define his career decades later. His father ran a furniture store in the city, and Epstein grew up surrounded by the textures of a declining New […]
Read MorePhilip Jones Griffiths
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in 1936 in Rhuddlan, a small town in Denbighshire, North Wales, the son of a local government official. He grew up speaking Welsh, absorbing the values of a tight-knit community that prized education, nonconformist religion, and a deep suspicion of imperial authority — values that would prove remarkably durable when […]
Read MoreSally Eauclaire
Sally Eauclaire emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one of the most perceptive and influential voices in the critical discourse surrounding colour photography at a moment when the medium was undergoing a profound transformation. For decades, serious art photography had been almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Colour was dismissed by the […]
Read MoreNadar
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was born in Paris in 1820 and would become known to the world simply as Nadar — a name he adopted in his youth and that would come to stand for an entire era of French cultural life. Before he ever picked up a camera, Nadar had already established himself as a journalist, […]
Read MorePhilip-Lorca diCorcia
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, into an Italian-American family. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later received his MFA from Yale University in 1979, where he studied under Tod Papageorge and was exposed to the conceptual approaches to photography that were beginning to reshape […]
Read MoreSally Mann
Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, the daughter of Robert Munger, a general practitioner with a deep love of literature and the natural world, and Elizabeth Evans Munger, a woman of fierce intelligence and quiet reserve. She grew up on the family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a landscape of rolling hills, […]
Read MoreNadav Kander
Nadav Kander was born in Tel Aviv in 1961 to South African parents of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, and the family moved to Johannesburg when he was still a child. Growing up under apartheid, Kander developed an early awareness of the way power structures shape the visible world — who builds, who is displaced, whose presence is […]
Read MoreRalph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Normal, Illinois, a small college town whose name would prove ironically apt for an artist whose life’s work was devoted to exploring the uncanny spaces between the normal and the strange. He showed no particular artistic inclination as a young man, serving in the United States Navy […]
Read MoreSaul Leiter
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923, the eldest son of a distinguished Talmudic scholar who fully expected his boy to follow him into the rabbinate. Leiter was a gifted student of religious texts, but from an early age he found himself drawn not to scripture but to painting. His mother gave him […]
Read MoreNaomi Harris
Naomi Harris is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Toronto whose work has consistently been drawn to the margins of North American culture — the communities, rituals, and gathering places where people shed their everyday inhibitions and construct alternative versions of themselves. Her photographs are characterised by their vivid colour, their unflinching intimacy, and their […]
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