Craigie Horsfield (Cambridge, UK, 1949) arrived at photography through painting. After studying painting at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, he began practising as a photographer in the early seventies, convinced that, as a genre, it offered a more efficient system for representing contemporary society. In 1972, he moved to Poland to experience life in a socialist country, resulting in a series of portraits of anonymous people. It was the beginning of a way of working that he has maintained to this day. Although he did not exhibit his work until the late eighties, his portraits, often in black and white, have an almost pictorial quality. Horsfield belongs to a generation that, in the late eighties, began to reconsider photographic work in terms of tableaux. He often prints his photographs long after they were taken, thus imbuing the work not only with an experiential and relational meaning, but also with memory in a dialogue between past and present.

His work has been exhibited in major group shows such as Documenta X and XI, Kassel (1997 and 2002), and solo shows such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1993); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1997); Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2010); and Tate Britain, London (2017). In Barcelona, he exhibited the series The City of the People at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (1996).