Max Hirshfeld

Max Hirshfeld is recognized as a master at spotting decisive moments while revealing the warmth and humanity of his subjects. He has undertaken several focused projects over the past two decades. From 2002-2005, in a series titled One Shot, Hirshfeld captured individual pedestrians in a single frame of film amid the chaos and color of urban settings in major cities across the United States. For his 2008 series, Looking at Looking, he spent over a year wandering through the National Gallery of Art, documenting the jazz-like dance movements of visitors as they viewed master works in the collection. In the spring of 2013, Hirshfeld commenced his Illuminaries series, which highlights key players in the Washington, DC, arts and cultural scene. The project serves as an important record of the extraordinary figures contributing to the advancement of Washington arts.

Hirshfeld was born in North Carolina in 1951 to parents who survived Auschwitz. He grew up in Decatur, Alabama and moved to Washington, DC, to study photography at George Washington University, graduating in 1973. His work has been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kreeger Museum, and is part of the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery and Yad Vashem Museum. He has won silver and bronze awards from the Prix de la Photographie Paris and been featured in Communication Arts and in American Photography. Hirshfeld’s editorial work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, and other national publications. In 2018 he was part of a team commissioned to produce art for the new American Embassy in Niamey, Niger. Forty portraits were produced in Niger and in North Carolina in creating Du Quotidien, a transboundary artwork designed to generate curiosity about cultural diplomacy. His first book "Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime" was published by Damiani in 2019.