Sylvia Plachy

Born in Budapest in 1943, Sylvia Plachy lived in Hungary until she was thirteen years old. She escaped with her parents in 1956, carrying only a modest suitcase, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution. Two years later, her family was finally able to leave Vienna and immigrate to the United States. They first lived in New Jersey and later moved to New York City.

While still in high school, Sylvia commuted by bus to Manhattan on Saturdays to take figure classes at the Art Students League. Later she studied art at Pratt Institute, majoring in graphic arts, and earning her BFA in 1965. An encounter with photography during her junior year, led to the discovery of her life's work. This past February, the German Photographic Society honored her with the Dr.-Erich-Salomon-Prize 2009 and called her compassionate and "... one of the most intriguing photographers of our time..."

After college, Sylvia worked as a photojournalist and portrait photographer. She was on staff for the Village Voice from 1974-2004, and her photo essays have appeared in many publications, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Smithsonian, Granta, Metropolis, Fortune, Geo, and Art Forum. Sylvia Plachy works in black and white, as well as in color. From early on in her career, she has worked and traveled on assignment, while simultaneously publishing books that are a blend of written and visual memories. Her first book in 1990, Unguided Tour, won ICP's Infinity Award for best publication. The book comes with a record by Tom Waits. Waits also contributed to the back cover, "… No one's afraid of Sylvia, she can go anywhere, and she doesn't scare the birds." Her book, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, is about childhood in Eastern Europe and received a Golden Light Award in 2006. Her other books are: Red Light, in collaboration with writer James Ridgeway; Goings On About Town, a collection of pictures taken for The New Yorker; Out of the Corner of My Eye, based on a show at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 2007, and Signs & Relics, with an introduction by Wim Wenders. In a review of this book for Aperture magazine, Charles Harbutt paid tribute to, "... Sylvia's enduring sense of wonder... She seems not at all concerned with impressing us with the enormity of her talent or the trendiness of her concepts but rather with noticing and photographing signposts to a world of allegory. There is a poetic and literary component to her images."

Sylvia Plachy has had one woman shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in New York, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Queens Museum of Art and also had solo shows in galleries in cities around the world such as Budapest, Ljubljana, Manchester, Berlin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. Her work was featured at photo festivals in Perpignan, Arles and Pingyau, as well as at PhotoEspana and Look3. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 and a Lucie Award in 2004.  Her photographs are in major collections.

She is married, lives in Queens, New York and has one son.