Max Vadukul

Max had his first US solo gallery show in 2011 at 212 Gallery in Aspen, Colorado titled, "Kinetic Force". In 2011 Max was featured in the group exhibition "Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, NY. He had a group show at The Wapping Project Bankside for "Yohji's Women" in London, England in 2011. Other group exhibitions include: "Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955 to the Present" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York & "Five Decades of Passion, We are the World: Figures & Portraits" at the Fisher Landau Center of Art, Long Island City, NY in 2009.

Max Vadukul has long standing relationships with The New Yorker, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, L'Uomo Vogue, W Magazine, Interview, and Rolling Stone. He shoots regularly for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Esquire, Vogue China, Egoiste, Town & Country, and others. His book, "MAX," published in 2000 by Nicholas Callaway, came out the same year as Helmut Newton's "Sumo," helping start the trend of oversized large-format photography books.

From 1996 to 2000 he held the post of The New Yorker’s staff photographer, shooting an average of 52 assignments a year. Other subjects included Al Gore, James Brown, Donald Trump, Natalie Portman, Tom Hanks, Roger Federer, Tilda Swinton, David Geffen, and a group portrait of 40 Nobel laureates. In 1997 he photographed almost the entirety of the magazine’s celebrated Indian Fiction issue. After his tenure at The New Yorker he followed its editor, Tina Brown, to become Photo Editor-At-Large of her Talk Magazine.

Vadukul was discovered in 1984 by the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, who assigned the then 22-year-old Vadukul one of his prestigious ad campaigns. It was the first of several Yamamoto campaigns for Vadukul and introduced the photography world to his dynamic movement-filled black-and-white images. Vadukul established his editorial career in the 1990s with a large body of work for French Vogue and Italian Vogue – much of which was produced with his wife, the eminent fashion editor Nicoletta Santoro, with whom he has collaborated regularly over the years. Recently, he shot two of W Magazine's annual "Art" issue covers - an overseas collaboration with the Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, and a collaboration with the artist George Condo and actress Jessica Chastain. In 1996 the producers of the Broadway musical "Chicago" asked Vadukul to create the new show's image; the dark, stylized black-and-white portraits he took remain the basis for the show's current campaigns.

In the 1980s and 90s he introduced a distinct blend of high-octane energy and offbeat spontaneity, through predominantly black-and-white images, into the traditionally commercial form of fashion photography. In the 1990s, as the second staff photographer in The New Yorker Magazine's history (following Richard Avedon), he emerged as one of the world's foremost portrait photographers, capturing hundreds of subjects ranging from Mother Theresa and Salman Rushdie to Mick Jagger and Mikail Baryshnikov. He describes his style as “art reportage,” which he calls the “taking of reality and turning into art.”

Max Vadukul (born 2 February 1961, Nairobi, Kenya) is a British photographer who is based in New York City. He is noted for his art reportage photography, which he describes as “taking reality and making it into art.” He has a lifelong affinity with black and white photography, a foundation of much of his early work. From 1996 to 2000 Max was the staff photographer for The New Yorker, second after Richard Avedon and is the first Indian photographer to shoot covers for French and American Vogue. . Sting has described his photography as a sort of "On the move style". The National Geographic channel produced a feature documentary on Vadukul in 2000 about the improbable arc of his life after Africa; the documentary continues to air around South Asia today.

Vadukul was born 1961 to an Indian family in Nairobi, Kenya. His family moved to Northern London when he was a teenager. He did not complete high school, but developed an interest in photography after his father took a job at the Carl Zeiss lens company. At the age of 16, he ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage.