Bruce Polin was born in NYC in 1960 and began photographing at the age of 14. Polin later studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and later received a BFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He assisted photographer Neil Slavin, printed for Rosalind Solomon, and, in the ‘80s, managed an art gallery in New York City’s East Village. He later started New York Dupes, a slide and transparency duplication service specifically for art galleries and museums. He was the first ‘official’ photographer for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. In the early ‘90s he founded Descarga, a music company specializing in Afro-Latin dance music.
In 2013 he began a portrait project in his basement studio using 8x10 film cameras as well as an obscure 4x5 twin-lens camera called the Gowlandflex, which, in 2016, he began taking outdoors to do field portraits in diverse areas of Brooklyn, NY.
Polin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, daughters, and his cat, Archie.