Lars Tunbjörk
Lars Tunbjörk was born in 1956 in Borås, a small textile manufacturing city in western Sweden, a place whose provincial ordinariness would haunt and inform his work throughout his life. He grew up in a working-class family and came to photography through newspaper journalism, working as a press photographer for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter […]
Read MoreLászló Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was born in 1895 in the small town of Bácsborsód in southern Hungary, the son of a farming family. His father abandoned the family when Moholy-Nagy was young, and he was raised by an uncle in the town of Mohács, whose name he later adopted as part of his own. He studied law […]
Read MoreLauren Greenfield
Lauren Greenfield was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Angeles, a city whose culture of surfaces, aspiration, and reinvention would become the central subject of her life’s work. Her father was a professor and her mother worked in education, and the family lived in Venice Beach, a neighbourhood where affluence […]
Read MoreLee Friedlander (1934)
Lee Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, a small lumber town on the Pacific Northwest coast that offered little in the way of artistic stimulation but much in the way of American ordinariness. It was precisely this ordinariness, the clutter and texture of everyday life in the United States, that would become his […]
Read MoreLee Miller
Lee Miller was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of Theodore Miller, an amateur photographer who introduced her to the camera at an early age. Her childhood was marked by a traumatic assault at the age of seven, an event whose long shadow would be felt throughout her life. She […]
Read MoreLeonard 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 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 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 MoreLooking at Photographs – John Szarkowski
From Amazon: ‘This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation’, wrote curator John Szarkowski in this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art’s photography collection. Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for […]
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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