Louis Pierson
Louis Pierson was born in 1822 in Hinckange, in the Moselle region of northeastern France. He came to photography through the commercial portrait trade, establishing himself in Paris during the 1840s and 1850s as the medium was transforming from scientific novelty to cultural phenomenon. By the mid-1850s, he was a partner in the prestigious studio […]
Read MoreHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, a small town east of Paris, into a wealthy family whose fortune derived from the textile trade. The eldest of five children, he grew up surrounded by culture and privilege, developing an early passion for the visual arts. As a young man he was drawn […]
Read MoreJohn Schott
John Schott is among the least visible yet most conceptually rigorous of the photographers who participated in the landmark 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Born in 1944, Schott studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later at the Visual Studies Workshop, […]
Read MoreLouise Dahl-Wolfe
Louise Dahl-Wolfe was born in 1895 in Alameda, California, across the bay from San Francisco, into a family of Norwegian descent. She grew up in a household that valued the arts, and after graduating from high school she enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute), where she studied […]
Read MoreHenry Wessel
Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up on the suburban East Coast before the landscape of the American West would claim him entirely. He studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 under […]
Read MoreJohn Scott
John Scott is a British documentary photographer whose work belongs to the tradition of sustained, community-based photographic practice that has been one of the most distinctive contributions of British photography to the wider medium. Working primarily in the towns, estates, and post-industrial landscapes of England, Scott has built a body of work characterised by a […]
Read MoreLua Ribeira
Lua Ribeira was born in Barcelona in 1986 and grew up in a city whose own traditions of street festival and communal spectacle would later find deep resonance in her photographic work. She studied fine art at the University of Barcelona before moving to the United Kingdom, where she completed a master’s degree in documentary […]
Read MoreHippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard was born on 20 January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye, a small town in the Oise department of northern France. He moved to Paris as a young man and found steady employment as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a position he would hold for much of his life. But behind the unremarkable façade […]
Read MoreJosef Koudelka
Josef Koudelka was born in 1938 in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague and trained as an aeronautical engineer, a profession he practised for several years while devoting every spare hour to photography. From the early 1960s he began photographing theatrical […]
Read MoreMan Ray
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, the eldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had recently arrived in the United States. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was seven, and it was in New York that the young Emmanuel — who would adopt the name Man Ray around 1912 — first […]
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