Artist
Sylvia Plachy
Via New York, NY, USA
Sylvia Plachy came into her own as a photographer at the Village Voice in New York City between 1974 and 2004, where for most of those years she was staff photographer. She had a photo column, a picture without caption, for eight years on the contents page. In 1990, her first book, Unguided Tour, culled from some of these pictures was published by Aperture and won an Infinity award for best publication.
Her photographs have also appeared in Granta, Grand Street, Artforum, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The New York Times, among others and at different times she has been a regular contributor to Metropolis and the New Yorker.
Her book Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, a personal history of Eastern Europe with text and photographs, received a Golden Light Award in 2004. Her other books are: Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry (1996), with writer James Ridgeway, Signs & Relics (1999); Goings On About Town (2007) and Out of the Corner of My Eye (2008). The recipient of numerous grants and prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lucie Award, Plachy was given the Dr. Erich Salomon Price for lifetime achievement in photojournalism in 2009.
Plachy’s photographs are in the Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum, the High Museum, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and in other collections. She has had solo shows in cities including Berlin, Paris, Manchester, Budapest, Madrid, New York and Ljubljana. In the fall of 2013, she had three shows in Europe: “Dancing with Ghosts” at the Blanca Berlin Gallery in Madrid, “Recontres” at Espaces54 in Paris and “When Will It Be Tomorrow?” at Art Market Budapest. Plachy was born in Budapest, and immigrated to the United States. Since receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1965 she has been a photographer. She lives in New York City with her husband. They have one son.
