WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD

William Albert Allard has been a major force at National Geographic and in mainstream photography for 50 years. He has contributed to National Geographic Society publications and books since 1964 as a staff member, a freelancer, and contracted photographer and writer. In addition, he was a former contributor to Magnum Photos and has been published in most major magazines in the United States and abroad. In October 2010, National Geographic Magazine recognized Allard’s work on the American West with a 10-page excerpt from his book WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD: Five Decades (Focal Point/National Geographic, 2010)

Allard is one of the few photographers of his generation whose entire professional body of work is in color. National Geographic photographers esteem Allard to be the pioneer and peerless exemplar of natural, expressive color in documentary photography.

The son of a Swedish immigrant father, William Albert Allard was born in 1937 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts and the University of Minnesota. Allard has received numerous awards for his work including the University of Minnesota Outstanding Achievement Award in 1994, The Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award in 2002 and the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communications Award for Excellence in 2004.

Allard has published six critically acclaimed books. His first book, Vanishing Breed (New York Graphic Society Books/Little Brown, 1981), was nominated for The American Book Award and received the Leica Medal of Excellence. Other books include The Photographic Essay (Bullfinch Press/Little Brown, 1989), A Time We Knew (University of Nevada Press, 1990), Time at the Lake: A Minnesota Album (Pfeifer/Hamilton Publishers, 1997), Portraits of America (Insight/National Geographic, 2001). His seventh book Eye of the Flaneur: Paris, a 31-year retrospective of his work in Paris is to be published by Edition Lammerhuber, Vienna, Austria in the fall of 2017. In 2019, Allard received the Figaro Magazine Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award at the Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France. His work is included in numerous permanent private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City and the Oklahoma Museum of Art. Allard lives near Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and two dogs.

The categories below are sorted by mediums. All Mr. Allard’s contemporary prints are now printed as archival pigment ink prints, but we have a few rare prints in the Dye Transfer, Cibachrome and Polaroid mediums.

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