Sylvia Plachy

Her book Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2005) received a Golden Light Award for best book in 2004. Plachy has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977), a Lucie Award (2004), and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award (2010).

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography, fine-art photography and photojournalism. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Work by Sylvia Plachy is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Photography Collection. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Publication Infinity Award, Lucie Award and Dr.

Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her Czech Jewish Hungarian mother was in hiding in fear of Nazi persecution during World War II. Her father was a Hungarian Roman Catholic of aristocratic descent and she was raised in his faith. She lost most of her relatives to the Holocaust. Plachy's family moved to New York City in 1958, two years after the Hungarian revolution, after crossing into Austria for safety, hidden in a horse-drawn cart. Plachy started photographing in 1964 "with an emphasis of recording the visual character of the city along with its diverse occupants". She studied photography at the Pratt Institute in New York City, receiving her B.F.A. in 1965. There she met the photographer André Kertész, who became her lifelong friend.

Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Artforum, Fortune, and other publications. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City, Paris and Tokyo. She started working at The Village Voice in 1974. Plachy's first book was Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour. Her book Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2005), is a personal history of Central Europe with photographs and text. Her other books are Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry with James Ridgeway (1996), Signs & Relics (2000), Out of the Corner of My Eye (2008) and Goings On About Town: Photographs for The New Yorker (2007). She has taught and lectured widely.

Plachy lives in New York City with her husband, Elliot Brody, and she is the mother of two time Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody.

Sylvia Plachy is recorded as photographer.