Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark was born on March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a middle-class family with deep roots in the city. From an early age she showed an instinct for visual storytelling, drawn to painting and drawing before discovering the camera as a teenager. She studied painting and art history at the University of […]
Read MoreMichael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War, into a city that was being reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. He grew up in West Berlin, in the shadow of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 onwards, and it is impossible to understand his […]
Read MoreMiguel Rio Branco
Miguel Rio Branco was born in 1946 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands, to Brazilian diplomatic parents. His childhood was itinerant: he grew up in Portugal, Brazil, Switzerland, and the United States, an experience of constant displacement that gave him an outsider’s perspective on every place he inhabited. He studied at […]
Read MoreMinor White
Minor White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1908, and from his earliest years displayed a temperament drawn equally to science and to poetry. He studied botany at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1933, but the Depression left few opportunities in the sciences, and White turned instead to writing and to the camera. His […]
Read MoreMirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 – John Szarkowski
Whe whole book is available on the MOMA web site here: https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2347_300062558.pdf NOTES: The following handwritten notes are from my MFA research notebook. This book was one of my favourite sources. The handwriting is almost illegible and the spelling worse!
Read MoreMitch Epstein
Mitch Epstein was born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Connecticut River whose industrial history would prove unexpectedly relevant to the work that would define his career decades later. His father ran a furniture store in the city, and Epstein grew up surrounded by the textures of a declining New […]
Read MoreNadar
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was born in Paris in 1820 and would become known to the world simply as Nadar — a name he adopted in his youth and that would come to stand for an entire era of French cultural life. Before he ever picked up a camera, Nadar had already established himself as a journalist, […]
Read MoreNadav Kander
Nadav Kander was born in Tel Aviv in 1961 to South African parents of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, and the family moved to Johannesburg when he was still a child. Growing up under apartheid, Kander developed an early awareness of the way power structures shape the visible world — who builds, who is displaced, whose presence is […]
Read MoreNan Goldin (1953)
Nan Goldin picked up a camera at the age of fifteen and never put it down. Born Nancy Goldin in Washington, D.C., in 1953, she was raised in a comfortable suburban household whose outward respectability concealed a private tragedy that would shape everything she made. Her older sister Barbara committed suicide at the age of […]
Read MoreNaomi Harris
Naomi Harris is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Toronto whose work has consistently been drawn to the margins of North American culture — the communities, rituals, and gathering places where people shed their everyday inhibitions and construct alternative versions of themselves. Her photographs are characterised by their vivid colour, their unflinching intimacy, and their […]
Read More