Ferenc Berko (1916–2000) was born in Nagyvárad, Hungary (now Oradea, Romania). Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by family friends in Berlin who encouraged his artistic interests and gave him his first camera. Through his adoptive family, Berko became acquainted with artists and teachers associated with the Bauhaus, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy, who became an influential friend and mentor. In the 1930s, Berko moved to London to study philosophy while pursuing photography and documentary filmmaking. There he met photographer E. O. Hoppé, another important mentor. He later moved to Paris, where he collaborated with his wife, Mirte, on photographic studies of the nude. In 1937, he traveled to Hungary to document Jewish life in Budapest. The growing threat of Nazism led him to Bombay, India, in 1938, where he worked as a documentary filmmaker and continued to experiment with photography.
In 1947, Berko held his first solo exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. That same year, he moved to Chicago at the invitation of Moholy-Nagy, who had died shortly before his arrival. Berko remained in Chicago and taught photography and filmmaking at the Institute of Design from 1947 to 1948, exploring abstraction in the urban environment while contributing to publications such as Paris Match, Réalités, and Popular Photography. In 1948, industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke invited him to Aspen, Colorado, to document the town's postwar development. After a brief return to London, Berko settled in Aspen, which became his home and a base for his extensive travels and photographic work. His photographs were widely exhibited and published and are held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Two monographs of his work appeared in 1995: Ferenc Berko: 60 Years of Photography—The Discovering Eye and Berko: Photographs.