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Edward Quinn (1920–1997) was born in Ireland. He lived and worked as a photographer from the 1950s, on the Côte d'Azur, during the "golden fifties" the playground of the celebrities from the world of show biz, art and business.

The rich and the famous came to the French Riviera to relax. But the movie stars knew how much their off-screen image counted; Quinn was at the right place at the right time, making spontaneous images which caught their charm, sophistication and chic. Amongst celebrities and stars captured on film by Quinn were Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Aristotle Onassis, Maria Callas, Winston Churchill, and Somerset Maugham.

In 1951 Edward Quinn met and photographed Pablo Picasso for the first time. Their friendship lasted until Picasso's death in 1973. This encounter with Picasso was to be greatly influential to Quinn himself and to his subsequent work. Quinn is the author of several books and films about Picasso.

Since the 1960s Quinn concentrated his work on artists, amongst them Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Graham Sutherland, David Hockney.

In the late 1980s an intense relationship, similar to his friendship with Picasso, linked Quinn to Georg Baselitz.

From 1992 until his death in 1997, Edward Quinn lived near Zürich with his Swiss wife Gret, who died in 2011. Quinn's nephew Wolfgang Frei now manages the extensive photo archive and founded the Edward Quinn Archive Ltd.