René Burri
René Burri was born in Zurich in 1933 and grew up in a Switzerland that, for all its neutrality, was surrounded by the convulsions of the Second World War. He studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under Hans Finsler, a pioneer of the New Photography whose emphasis on formal rigour and clean, […]
Read MoreStephen Gill
Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971 and grew up in the west of England before moving to London, where he would spend nearly two decades engaged in one of the most sustained and inventive photographic explorations of a single place that contemporary photography has produced. Gill’s early interest in photography was shaped by […]
Read MoreNobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in the Minowa district of Tokyo, near the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, and the geography of his birth would prove prophetic. He grew up in a neighbourhood saturated with the history of desire, entertainment, and the floating world, and from his earliest years he absorbed the visual culture of a […]
Read MoreRichard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born on 15 May 1923 in New York City to a Jewish family with roots in the garment trade. His father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and the young Richard grew up surrounded by fashion, fabric, and the rhythms of commerce. His mother, Anna, kept elegant photo […]
Read MoreSteve McCurry
Steve McCurry was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of the city. He studied film and history at Pennsylvania State University, where he also began working for the student newspaper and discovered a passion for visual storytelling. After graduating, he worked briefly at a newspaper before deciding to pursue […]
Read MoreOtto Snoek
Otto Snoek is a Dutch contemporary photographer whose work occupies a distinctive space between documentary observation and poetic interpretation. Working primarily in the Netherlands, Snoek brings to the familiar landscapes, interiors, and domestic scenes of his home country an eye that is simultaneously precise and dreamlike, finding in the flat Dutch terrain and its distinctive […]
Read MoreRichard Billingham
Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham and grew up in a council tower block in the Cradley Heath area of the Black Country, in the industrial West Midlands. His father, Ray, was an alcoholic who brewed his own drink and spent most of his time confined to the flat. His mother, Liz, was […]
Read MoreOtto Steinert
Otto Steinert was born in 1915 in Saarbrücken, in the Saar region of Germany that would change national sovereignty several times during his lifetime. He studied medicine at the universities of Munich, Marburg, and Berlin, qualifying as a physician in 1939, and served as a military doctor during the Second World War. But photography had […]
Read MoreRichard Kalvar
Richard Kalvar was born in New York City in 1944 and grew up with an instinctive sense of the comedy embedded in human behaviour. He studied English literature at Cornell University, where he developed the literary sensibility — the ear for irony, the eye for the telling detail — that would come to distinguish his […]
Read MorePatrick Zachmann
Patrick Zachmann was born in 1955 in Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb south of Paris, into a family whose Jewish heritage had been obscured by the traumas of the Second World War. His grandparents had survived the Holocaust, but the family seldom spoke of their origins, and Zachmann grew up in an atmosphere of deliberate forgetting. This […]
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