Introduction
Will McBride (January 10, 1931 – January 29, 2015) was an American
photographer in reportage, art photography and book illustration as well as a painter and sculptor.
Life
McBride was born in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up in Chicago. He was trained as a painter by Norman Rockwell and went on to study drawing and painting at Syracuse University, where he graduated in 1953. From 1953 to 1955 he served in the U.S. Army at Würzburg, Germany, and would remain in Germany until his death.
His work has been published in the German youth magazine Twen, among other European magazines. Twen provoked a scandal when they published McBride's portraits of his pregnant wife Barbara in 1960.
The bulk of his photography work is not often seen in the USA. McBride's work includes nudity and has experienced censorship. McBride received censure for the photography in his 1975 book Show Me! (German title Zeig Mal!).
Solo exhibitions of his work from 2000 on have included at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, the Dany Keller Galerie, Munich and the Galerie argus fotokunstas well as the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.
In 2004 McBride received the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize which is bestowed by the German Photographic Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie).
Selected books
- Show Me!, 1975. (German title Zeig Mal!).
- Foto-Tagebuch 1953 - 1961, 1982.
- Adenauer und seine Kinder - Fotografien von 1956-1968, 1994.
- My Sixties, 1994.
- I, Will McBride, 1997. (Retrospective)
- Coming of Age, Aperture, 1999. (Introductory essay, "Ways of Being Human", by Guy Davenport).
- Situationen Projekte: Ein Fotobuch, 2000.
- McBride, Will (2013), Bertram, Mathias, ed., Berlin im Aufbruch. Fotografien 1956-1963, Leipzig: Lehmstedt