Will McBride was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1931. From 1948 to 1950 he studied English at the University of Vermont; in 1950 he started studying painting and art history at Syracuse University in New York. From 1953 to 1955 he served as a US Army officer in Germany, where he produced his first photographs. In 1955 he moved to Berlin, where he studied philology at the Freie Universität. McBride photographed for magazines like Life, Paris Match and Look – and later Quick, Eltern, Stern and Playboy. In 1960 a photo of his pregnant wife Barbara Wilke, published in Twen, caused a scandal. That picture and photos of the birth of his son made him famous. In 1961 he opened his own photo studio in Munich. Starting in 1965 McBride taught photojournalism at Ulm’s school of design, the Hochschule für Gestaltung. In 1972 he moved to Casoli di Camaiore in Tuscany and occupied himself increasingly with sculpture and painting. McBride moved back to Germany in 1983 and opened a studio for photography, sculpture and painting in Frankfurt am Main that he operated until 1998. In 1999 he moved to Berlin, where he died in 2015.
