Matthew Pillsbury

Matthew Pillsbury — Biography

In long-exposure black-and-white pictures, French-born American photographer Matthew Pillsbury explores how people live with screens and with the city. He is best known for Screen Lives, which shows friends and family in front of computer and television screens, for his after-hours museum pictures, and for City Stages, a collection of New York scenes. He lives in New York and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery.

He studied at the École alsacienne in Paris, then at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts in New York. His Screen Lives series, inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto's cinema photographs, shows family and friends in their apartments in front of their screens. In 2004 The New York Times Magazine commissioned him to photograph New York museums after closing time, and he carried the project to London and Paris, including the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The 2012 City Stages exhibition was followed in 2013 by a monograph from Aperture.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of eleven photographers honoured in 2014, and the Prix HSBC pour la photographie. That year he photographed Tokyo, and after moving to Brooklyn in 2015 he widened the project to the outer boroughs; the relaunched cover of The New York Times Magazine carried his picture of a spinning globe shot in his basement. At ten he played Catherine Deneuve's son in Le Bon Plaisir, his only film role.