A leg hangs from a bush. Is a body attached? A naked, thinning-haired man contorts his limbs on Brooklyn Bridge, a bicycle nearby. Performance art? A troubled mental state? Someone who simply enjoys public nudity? All answers are right, and none are. Photographs capture reality without being reality itself. Richard Kalvar has spent over fifty years searching streets, bars, parks and parties for the magical alignment of composition, framing and subject that creates a universe within one frame. “When you take a photograph, you extract it from something larger, moving and three-dimensional,” he says. “You give meaning to this isolated moment, and the meaning is not always clear, almost never very clear.” Born in New York in 1944, Kalvar graduated from Cornell University and assisted fashion photographer Jérôme Ducrot. Moving to France in 1970, he helped establish the Viva agency. He joined Magnum in 1975 and became a full member in 1977.
 
He lives in Paris with his wife and two children.