Leonard Freed
Leonard Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. He grew up in a working-class neighbourhood where questions of identity, belonging, and social justice were not abstract concepts but the texture of daily life. After graduating from high school, he initially […]
Read MoreHelen Levitt
Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighbourhood whose streets and stoops would provide the template for her life’s work. She left school at an early age and found employment in the portrait studio of J. Florian Mitchell in the Bronx, […]
Read MoreJoel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld was born in 1944 in New York City and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He studied painting at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1965, and it was during his undergraduate years that he began to experiment with photography. His early interest in the medium was shaped less by the prevailing […]
Read MoreLeoni Hampton
Leoni Hampton is a contemporary documentary photographer whose work sits at the intersection of personal history and social observation. Born in Australia and now based in the United Kingdom, she brings to her practice a sensibility shaped by the experience of migration, cultural dislocation, and the search for belonging that characterises so many lives in […]
Read MoreHelmar Lerski
Helmar Lerski was born Israel Schmuklerski in Strasbourg in 1871, when the city was under German administration. He grew up in Zürich, where he trained initially as a bank clerk before the theatre drew him away from conventional employment. In the 1890s he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Midwest, where he worked […]
Read MoreJohn Baldessari
John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border just south of San Diego. His father was a salvage dealer who had emigrated from Austria, and his mother was Danish. It was not a background that naturally led to the art world, and Baldessari’s path to becoming […]
Read MoreLewis Baltz
Lewis Baltz was born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, at a moment when Southern California was beginning the explosive postwar development that would transform its landscape from agricultural land and open desert into an endless expanse of tract housing, shopping centres, freeways, and industrial parks. He grew up watching this transformation firsthand, and the […]
Read MoreHelmut Newton
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. His father owned a button factory, and the young Helmut grew up in the comfortable bourgeois world of Weimar-era Berlin — a city of cabarets, cinema, and avant-garde art that would leave an indelible mark on his […]
Read MoreJohn Gossage
John Gossage was born in 1946 in New York City but has spent most of his working life in Washington, D.C., a city whose margins, neglected spaces, and transitional zones have provided the primary subject matter for one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary photography. He came to the medium young, studying […]
Read MoreLouis 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 […]
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