Will McBride

Short biography
Will McBride (*1931) is an American photographer and prominent Artist established in Berlin.

 

McBride grew up in Chicago and  from 1950 to 1953 he studied, among other things, painting and art history in New York City. Alongside, he took privat lessons with Norman Rockwell.

During his military service for the U.S Army he was stationed in Würzburg, Germany, from 1950 to 1955. Thereafter he stayed in Germany and studied Philology at the Free University in Berlin. In 1959 he established himself as a freelance photographer in Berlin, and then in Munich in 1961. In 1965,  he there founded his own fotostudio, in which he mostly produced work for the advertising industry.

From 1972 to 1982, he stripped himself away from his professional life and lived with his friend near Casoli Camaiore in Tuscany where he occupied himself with painting and sculpture. In 1983 he opened a photo studio in Frankfurt that he ran until 1998. Today McBride lives once again in Berlin  as a freelance artist.

McBride worked as a photo reporter for magazines such as Quick, Eltern, Geo, Stern, Life, Look, Playboy and Paris Match.

In 1960, the youth magazine Twen published portraits of his pregant wife Barbara in profile, provoking a great scandal. Outrage also errupted around McBrides photodocumentation of his son’s birth and in particular around his sex education book Zeig Mal! (Show Me!)

In 1992 the retrospective Will McBride—40 years of photography took place in Frankfurt, Bonn, Hamburg and Munich among other places. In 2004 he was awarded the Salomon-Preis by the German Photographic Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie).

Photographs
Signed photographs by Will McBride are available in different sizes in unlimited editions.