John Harding

John Forrest Harding (born 1940) is a San Francisco–based photographer best known for the color street photography that he has pursued for four decades. Harding is the author of several photography books, and has taught courses on photography at City College of San Francisco and College of Marin. Life and career John Harding was born on August 6, 1940 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Granite City, Illinois. He worked at Granite City Steel, studied at Southern Illinois University, took up photography after seeing the film Blow-up, and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under Jack Fulton and Henry Wessel, obtaining an MFA in 1976. Harding has worked on commercial and editorial assignments (for Fortune and elsewhere), and has taught in the College of Marin and the Photography Department of the City College of San Francisco. Separately from the work he was assigned to do, Harding long photographed for his own interest. From 1975 to 1976, he made black and white portraits of adult brothers and sisters in the US. Thanks in part to an NEA grant, the series was published in 1982 in the photobooks Geschwister and Siblings; in 2016, he published a supplement, also titled Siblings.