Eugène Atget
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born in 1857 in Libourne, a small town near Bordeaux in south-western France. Orphaned at an early age — both parents died before he was seven — he was raised by an uncle in the suburbs of Paris. His early life was marked by restlessness and a search for vocation that would […]
Read MoreFazal Sheikh
Fazal Sheikh was born in New York City in 1965 to a Kenyan father of South Asian descent and a Swiss-American mother. This multicultural heritage instilled in him from the beginning an awareness of the complexity of belonging and displacement, themes that would come to define his life’s work. He studied at Princeton University, where […]
Read MoreFrancesca Woodman
Francesca Stern Woodman was born in 1958 in Denver, Colorado, into a family of artists. Her father, George Woodman, was a painter and ceramicist; her mother, Betty Woodman, was a celebrated ceramic artist whose work would be exhibited internationally. The household was steeped in art and aesthetics, and Francesca grew up surrounded by creativity, spending […]
Read MoreFrank Gohlke
Frank Gohlke was born in 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas, a small city on the edge of the Great Plains whose flat, windswept terrain and sparse, functional architecture would become the foundational landscape of his artistic imagination. He grew up amid the grain elevators, oil derricks, and wide horizons of North Texas, absorbing a sense […]
Read MoreFrederick Sommer
Frederick Sommer was born in 1905 in Angri, a small town near Naples in southern Italy. His father was a Swiss-German landscape architect, and the family moved frequently during Sommer’s childhood, living in Italy, Brazil, and eventually the United States. This itinerant upbringing gave him an unusually cosmopolitan perspective and a fluency in multiple languages […]
Read MoreGarry Winogrand (1928 – 1984)
Garry Winogrand was born on January 14, 1928, in the Bronx, New York, into a working-class Jewish family. His father worked in the leather goods trade, and the neighbourhood in which Winogrand grew up was dense, loud, and teeming with the kind of street-level human theatre that would later become the raw material of his […]
Read MoreGeorge Platt Lynes
George Platt Lynes was born in 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey, into a comfortable, cultured family. His father was a minister and his mother a woman of refined literary tastes who encouraged her son’s early interest in the arts. As a teenager, Lynes was already corresponding with Gertrude Stein and had begun publishing a […]
Read MoreGilles Peress
Gilles Peress was born in 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, and grew up in a France still haunted by the memory of occupation and collaboration. He studied political science and philosophy at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the Université de Vincennes, an intellectual formation that would profoundly shape his approach to […]
Read MoreGillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England, and grew up in the city’s suburbs during a period of post-industrial decline and social upheaval. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 1990 as part of a generation of British artists — including Damien Hirst, […]
Read MoreGordon Parks
Gordon Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a poor Black family living under the harsh realities of segregation. His father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a tenant farmer, and the family scraped by with little money and fewer opportunities. Yet even as a boy, Parks […]
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