Will McBride

Will McBride - Studies in New York and Berlin

Will McBride was born on 10th January 1931 in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent his childhood and youth in Chicago. He went to New York to study painting and art history, attending the National Academy of Design from 1950 to 1951 and Syracuse University from 1951 to 1953, and also took private lessons with the painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell alongside his regular studies. McBride came to Germany in the course of his service with the US Army, for which he was stationed in Würzburg between 1953 and 1955. Once completed, he remained in Germany and studied philology at the Free University of Berlin. His career as a photographer also began in Berlin with black and white images of post-war youth attempting to break away from the old structures of their parents' generation and struggling to find a new approach to the world. Will McBride moved to Munich in 1961 and founded his own photo studio there in 1965.

Many successes and a few scandals

Will McBride initially worked mainly in advertising and as a photo reporter for magazines such as Brigitte, Geo, Life, Paris Match, Playboy, Quick and Stern. His photo essays, of which he published 30 in the youth magazine twen alone, were widely distributed. Some of the pictures caused real scandals, such as the photo of his pregnant wife Barbara Wilke with her jeans undone or the photographic documentation of the birth of his son. The sex education book, Show Me!, illustrated with numerous nude photos of minors, was the subject of several international lawsuits and is banned in many states in the USA. To avoid further legal disputes, McBride withdrew the book from the market in 1996. After the cancellation of twen and the insolvency of his Munich studio, McBride experienced an existential crisis in his personal life when the divorce from his wife led to the loss of custody of his sons. McBride struggled with alcohol and drugs and was eventually forced to spend time in a sanatorium.  

Limited success as a painter

Affected by this personal crisis, Will McBride took on a secluded life from 1972 to 1982 and lived with his partner on a country estate in Tuscany, during which time, he tried his hand as a sculptor and painter. In 1982, he opened a new studio in Frankfurt am Main, but also gave up this photo studio in 1998 and turned to painting for good. During this time, photographs were only taken for his private use as models for his pictures - mostly nudes of young men - but the paintings did not meet with a great response. Will McBride received prizes and awards for his work, including the Dr Erich Salomon Prize from the German Photographic Society in 2004 and honorary membership of the German Designer Club in 2011 in recognition of his life's work. One of his most iconic works is the 1968 black and white photograph of the cast of the musical Hair, who posed naked in cardboard boxes for the photographer.

Will McBride died in Berlin on 29th January 2015.