Sylvia Plachy

Teaches at Los Angeles Center of Photography

Sylvia Plachy has been a photographer since graduating with a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1965. She has had six photo books published. Unguided Tour (Aperture 1990), with a record by Tom Waits, won ICP’s Infinity Award for best publication of 1990. Red Light (Power- house Books, 1996) was a collaboration with writer James Ridgeway about the sex industry. Signs & Relics (powerHouse2000) includes a foreword by Wim Wenders. Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (Aperture, 2004), a personal history of Eastern Europe, won the Golden Light Award for best book of the year. In 2007 Aperture and the New Yorker co-published Goings On About Town: Photographs for the New Yorker. Out of the Corner of My Eye (De Reojo, 2007) was published in Spain as one of the publications of Madrid’s Photo España and co-published by Umbrage Editions in the United States.

Sylvia is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received numerous awards, including an Arts and Achievement Award from the Queens Museum., Pratt Alumni Achievement Award, Lucie Award, Page One Award for Journalism from Columbia University, Dr. Erich Salomon Price for Lifetime Achievement in Photojournalism.
She has conducted workshops and lectured at Anderson Ranch, International Center of Photography, New York University, the Maine Photographic Workshops, Friends of Photography, the University of Memphis, Glassel School of Art in Houston, the NewYork Public Library, Center for Photography at Woodstock; Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, in Aranjuez, Spain, in Homer, Alaska, at the Arvada Center and the National Arts Club in New York City and at the Palm Springs Photo Festival.

Her work is in many private collections, as well as at the George Eastman House, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art, the Queens Mus- eum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art 
in New York City, the Bibliothèque National, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among others.

Born in Budapest, she left with her parents after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and immigrated to the United States in 1958. She lives in Queens with her husband. They have one son.