Nicholas Blair (b. New York) is a photographer and cinematographer whose work spans five decades of street photography and documentary filmmaking. Blair came to photography unconventionally — dropping out of high school, hitchhiking through South America, and landing in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, where he found his way to the San Francisco Art Institute through the mentorship of photographer and teacher Henry Wessel. His father, the cinematographer Vachel Blair, had introduced him early to the grammar of the image. The San Francisco years gave him a method: pre-focusing the lens before raising the camera, suspending deliberate thought, reacting to what appears. His portfolios range from West Coast street life to India, Coney Island to Castro, New York to Nantucket — each sustained by the same question: what happens to a moment when it becomes an image? In 1985 he began a parallel career in cinematography, working for CARE, the United Nations, ABC, HBO, and PBS. His documentary films include Our Holocaust Vacation, a journey through Poland with his mother revisiting her wartime experiences.Blair is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others.