Edward 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 […]
Read MoreEugène Atget
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born in 1857 in Libourne, a small town near Bordeaux in south-western France. Orphaned at an early age — both parents died before he was seven — he was raised by an uncle in the suburbs of Paris. His early life was marked by restlessness and a search for vocation that would […]
Read MoreFazal Sheikh
Fazal Sheikh was born in New York City in 1965 to a Kenyan father of South Asian descent and a Swiss-American mother. This multicultural heritage instilled in him from the beginning an awareness of the complexity of belonging and displacement, themes that would come to define his life’s work. He studied at Princeton University, where […]
Read MoreFifty Key Writers on Photography – Mark Durden
From Amazon: A clear and concise survey of some of the most significant writers on photography who have played a major part in defining and influencing our understanding of the medium. It provides a succinct overview of writing on photography from a diverse range of disciplines and perspectives and examines the shifting perception of the medium […]
Read MoreFrancesca Woodman
Francesca Stern Woodman was born in 1958 in Denver, Colorado, into a family of artists. Her father, George Woodman, was a painter and ceramicist; her mother, Betty Woodman, was a celebrated ceramic artist whose work would be exhibited internationally. The household was steeped in art and aesthetics, and Francesca grew up surrounded by creativity, spending […]
Read MoreFrank Gohlke
Frank Gohlke was born in 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas, a small city on the edge of the Great Plains whose flat, windswept terrain and sparse, functional architecture would become the foundational landscape of his artistic imagination. He grew up amid the grain elevators, oil derricks, and wide horizons of North Texas, absorbing a sense […]
Read MoreFrederick Sommer
Frederick Sommer was born in 1905 in Angri, a small town near Naples in southern Italy. His father was a Swiss-German landscape architect, and the family moved frequently during Sommer’s childhood, living in Italy, Brazil, and eventually the United States. This itinerant upbringing gave him an unusually cosmopolitan perspective and a fluency in multiple languages […]
Read MoreGarry Winogrand (1928 – 1984)
Garry Winogrand was born on January 14, 1928, in the Bronx, New York, into a working-class Jewish family. His father worked in the leather goods trade, and the neighbourhood in which Winogrand grew up was dense, loud, and teeming with the kind of street-level human theatre that would later become the raw material of his […]
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