Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia Plachy (born 24 May 1943) is a Hungarian-American photographer. Plachy's work has been featured in many New York City magazines and newspapers and she "was an influential staff photographer for The Village Voice." Her father was a Hungarian Roman Catholic of aristocratic descent and she was raised in his faith. She lost most of her relatives to the Holocaust. Plachy's family moved to New York City in 1958, two years after the Hungarian revolution, after crossing into Austria for safety, hidden in a horse-drawn cart.

Plachy started photographing in 1964 "with an emphasis of recording the visual character of the city along with its diverse occupants". She studied photography at the Pratt Institute in New York City, receiving her B.F.A. in 1965. There she met the photographer André Kertész, who became her lifelong friend.

Career Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Artforum, Fortune, and other publications. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City, Paris and Tokyo. She started working at The Village Voice in 1974. 1991: Publication award, Infinity Awards from the International Center of Photography, New York, for Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour 2004: Lucie Award

Collections

Plachy's work is held in the following permanent collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York City Minneapolis Institute of Arts Houston Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco Museum of Modern Art