Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the first child of a second-generation German-American family. At the age of seven she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. The experience marked her profoundly. Rather than retreating from the world, the disability gave her an acute sensitivity […]
Read MoreDoug DuBois
Doug DuBois is an American photographer whose practice is defined by the depth and duration of his engagement with his subjects. Where many photographers pass through communities, extracting images and moving on, DuBois commits to relationships that extend over years, sometimes decades, building a body of work that earns its intimacy through sustained presence and […]
Read MoreDuane Michals
Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town south of Pittsburgh whose industrial landscape and working-class culture shaped his early understanding of the world. His father worked in a steel mill, and the family lived modestly. Michals showed an early aptitude for drawing and visual thinking, but there was no tradition […]
Read MoreEadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England, a market town on the outskirts of London. He emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in San Francisco around 1855, where he worked initially as a bookseller and publisher’s agent. The circumstances of his transformation from a […]
Read MoreEd Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he developed an early fascination with commercial lettering, signage, and the visual culture of the American roadside. In 1956, he drove west to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and the journey along Route […]
Read MoreEd van der Elsken
Ed van der Elsken was born in 1925 in Amsterdam, into a middle-class family that offered little encouragement for artistic ambitions. He studied sculpture briefly at the city’s academy of art before turning to photography, a medium that suited his restless, confrontational temperament far better than the slow deliberation of working in three dimensions. In […]
Read MoreEdward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, a city in the industrial heartland of Canada’s Niagara region. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants, and his father worked at the local General Motors plant — a detail of biography that would prove formative, for it was in the vast, roaring factories and the scarred […]
Read MoreEdward Steichen
Edward Jean Steichen was born in 1879 in the village of Bivange, Luxembourg, and emigrated with his family to the United States as an infant, settling in Hancock, Michigan, before the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother encouraged his artistic inclinations, and by the age of fifteen he had begun a four-year apprenticeship at […]
Read MoreEdward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb north of Chicago. His father gave him his first camera at the age of sixteen, and the young Weston took to photography with an immediate and consuming passion. He briefly attended the Illinois College of Photography before moving to California in […]
Read MoreElliott Erwitt
Elliott Erwitt was born Elio Romano Erwitz in Paris in 1928 to Russian Jewish émigré parents. His early childhood was spent in Milan, Italy, before his family emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling first in New York and then in Los Angeles. It was in Hollywood, of all places, that the young Erwitt […]
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