The legendary photographer Richard Avedon wrote of Sylvia Plachy: “She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.” Plachy’s poetic and visually stunning work brilliantly combines memoirs and wry observation in this major retrospective collection of images ranging over forty years. Capturing the curiousness of everyday events, Plachy’s pictures combine personal narrative with public display, and—through the immediacy of her experience—encapsulate the timelessness of metaphor and dream. “What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world,” Plachy says. “You are instinctively aware it’s there, but you’ve got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.” Her lyrical, gently subversive images look at life revealed through clues, fragments of words, in layers of meaning.

Slyvia Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary, to parents who hid during the Nazi persecution only to escape the Hungarian revolution, buried under corn in the back of a truck. She now lives in New York City with her husband Elliott Brody, and is the mother of Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody, who says of her, “Tremendously gifted and talented as an artist, she is also a real survivor and the hardest working person I know.”