Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England, and grew up in the city’s suburbs during a period of post-industrial decline and social upheaval. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 1990 as part of a generation of British artists — including Damien Hirst, […]
Read MoreGordon Parks
Gordon Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a poor Black family living under the harsh realities of segregation. His father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a tenant farmer, and the family scraped by with little money and fewer opportunities. Yet even as a boy, Parks […]
Read MoreGregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a middle-class household whose domestic life would later provide the emotional substrate for much of his work. His father was a psychoanalyst who practised from the family home, and Crewdson has spoken of lying on the floor as a child, trying […]
Read MoreHannah Starkey
Hannah Starkey was born in 1971 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during one of the most turbulent periods of the Troubles. She grew up in a city defined by conflict and division, an environment that instilled in her a heightened awareness of the ways in which public space is shaped by politics, gender, and power. She […]
Read MoreHans Aarsman
Hans Aarsman was born in 1951 in Amsterdam, and his early career followed a conventional path for a Dutch documentary photographer of his generation. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and worked as a freelance photographer through the 1970s and 1980s, producing documentary images of Dutch life that appeared in newspapers and magazines. He […]
Read MoreHans Eijkelboom
Hans Eijkelboom was born in 1949 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and came of age during a period when the boundaries between fine art and photography, between conceptual practice and documentary tradition, were being radically redrawn. He studied at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Arnhem and emerged in the early 1970s as a conceptual artist […]
Read MoreHarry Callahan
Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent his early adulthood working as a clerk at the Chrysler Corporation, a job that offered no hint of the extraordinary artistic career that lay ahead. He purchased his first camera in 1938 and joined the Detroit Photo Guild, a local amateur photography club, where […]
Read MoreHarvey Benge
Harvey Benge was born in 1944 in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and came to photography relatively late in life, after careers in science and business. He studied biochemistry at the University of Otago and later worked in research and commerce before turning to photography in the 1990s. This unconventional path — arriving at art through […]
Read MoreHelen Levitt
Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighbourhood whose streets and stoops would provide the template for her life’s work. She left school at an early age and found employment in the portrait studio of J. Florian Mitchell in the Bronx, […]
Read MoreHelmar Lerski
Helmar Lerski was born Israel Schmuklerski in Strasbourg in 1871, when the city was under German administration. He grew up in Zürich, where he trained initially as a bank clerk before the theatre drew him away from conventional employment. In the 1890s he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Midwest, where he worked […]
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