Looking 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 […]
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 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 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 […]
Read MoreMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, a small town in Normandy, into a family of remarkable artistic accomplishment. His elder brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were both established artists; his sister Suzanne Duchamp would become a painter of note. The young Marcel studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from […]
Read MoreMargaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on 14 June 1904, the daughter of an engineer-inventor father and a progressive, intellectually ambitious mother who encouraged her daughter’s curiosity about the natural and mechanical world. Her father, Joseph White, worked in the printing industry and took young Margaret to factories and foundries, instilling in her a […]
Read MoreMark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city in the coal-mining region of the northeastern part of the state. He has lived and worked there for virtually his entire life, a fact that distinguishes him from nearly every other photographer of comparable stature. While his contemporaries roamed the world in […]
Read MoreMark Neville
Mark Neville was born in London in 1966 and studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he developed the socially engaged photographic practice that would distinguish his career. Unlike photographers who observe communities from the outside and exhibit the resulting images in galleries far removed from the lives they […]
Read MoreMarkéta Luskačová
Markéta Luskačová was born in Prague in 1944, during the final year of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in the post-war period, studied sociology and philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and it was through her sociological research that she first encountered the communities that would become the subject of her most […]
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