Helen 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 […]
Read MoreHelmut Newton
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. His father owned a button factory, and the young Helmut grew up in the comfortable bourgeois world of Weimar-era Berlin — a city of cabarets, cinema, and avant-garde art that would leave an indelible mark on his […]
Read MoreHenri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, a small town east of Paris, into a wealthy family whose fortune derived from the textile trade. The eldest of five children, he grew up surrounded by culture and privilege, developing an early passion for the visual arts. As a young man he was drawn […]
Read MoreHenry Wessel
Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up on the suburban East Coast before the landscape of the American West would claim him entirely. He studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 under […]
Read MoreHippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard was born on 20 January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye, a small town in the Oise department of northern France. He moved to Paris as a young man and found steady employment as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a position he would hold for much of his life. But behind the unremarkable façade […]
Read MoreHow You Look At It- Photography of the 20th Century – Thomas Weski
From Amazon: This collection explores the various ways in which photography shaped our view of the 20th century, at the same time providing a record of the radical changes undergone by our towns, landscapes and private lives. Carefully juxtaposed with photographs the are paintings and sculptures.
Read MoreInverted Odysseys – Shelley Rice
From Amazon: An “odyssey” through historical, theoretical, critical, and literary perspectives on the three artists. Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman were born in different countries, in different generations; Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954. Yet they share a deeply theatrical obsession that […]
Read MoreIrving Penn
Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, the elder of two sons in a family of modest means. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, but it was Irving who first found his way into the visual arts. As a teenager he discovered […]
Read MoreJacob Aue Sobol
Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen in 1976 and grew up in Denmark with an early awareness that he wanted to engage the world through direct, physical experience rather than from a comfortable distance. He studied at the European Film College in the mid-1990s, where he first picked up a camera, and subsequently enrolled […]
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