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Ansel Adams Biography Known for capturing essential landscapes along the American west, Ansel Adams established himself as one of the most influential and prolific 20th century photographers. Distinct from his contemporaries, Adams was not preoccupied with capturing shots that perfectly emulate reality; instead, he harnessed his knowledge of photographic theory and employed techniques that highlight the intricate and effervescent character of some of Earth’s greatest sites. His work evokes the same heightened sense of serenity that one feels when experiencing an element of nature for the first time.

Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902. Faced with dyslexia... View artist page

Lillian Bassman Biography Lillian Bassman (1917 - 2012) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to parents she once described as “bohemian.” This fashion photographer fell in love fast with the photographs of dancer Isadora Duncan in her flowing, floating gowns, inspiring Lillian’s affinity for scarves which she attributed to Isadora’s sinuous, constantly moving fabrics.

Lillian worked as a textile designer and fashion illustrator before working at Harper’s Bazaar in 1946. In 1949, she photographed her first Paris couture collection, which led to Lillian Bassman’s distinguished career as a photographer of the era’s leading models. However, she once claimed it... View artist page

Julie Blackmon Biography Julie Blackmon is known for her meticulously composed images that explore the complexities of modern family life. Born in 1966 in Springfield, Missouri, Blackmon continues to live and work in her hometown, drawing inspiration from her personal experiences and surroundings. Blending humor, nostalgia, and social commentary, her photographs transform everyday domestic scenes into surreal and theatrical narratives that examine gender roles, societal pressures, and the intersection of the mundane and the fantastical. Influenced by artists such as Helen Levitt and Sally Mann, Blackmon crafts layered compositions that evoke both a sense of place and an underlying tension.... View artist page

Josef Breitenbach Biography German photographer Josef Breitenbach was known for his experimental manipulated images and stark photographs. Raised with an intelligent respect for the history of art and culture, he worked with an attentive understanding and appreciation for a multitude of styles and artistic expressions. Breitenbach focused on form and abstraction as well as the sensual and psychological side of his subjects. In his work Breitenbach experimented with a number of techniques including bleaching, color printing, montage, solarization, and double exposure. He was most interested in using photography and color for their transformative and expressive potential. He refused to be... View artist page

Paul Caponigro Biography

Paul Caponigro, renowned as one of America’s most significant master photographers is known for his captivating and mystical landscape images. His exquisite silver gelatin prints depict images of nature, including flowers, cloud formations, and forest settings. His work forms a visual bridge between the material world of physical forms and the living spirit behind them.

Born in Boston in 1932, Caponigro began taking pictures at the young age of thirteen while also maintaining a strong passion for music. He studied at Boston University College of Music in 1950 before deciding to focus on photography at the California...

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Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a pioneering French photographer renowned for his contributions to street photography and photojournalism. Born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France, Cartier-Bresson initially pursued painting, studying under André Lhote and embracing Surrealism. However, his fascination with photography soon took precedence, leading to a career that redefined the medium. One of Henri Cartier-Bresson ’s most iconic images, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932), captures a man mid-air over a puddle, perfectly epitomizing his concept of the 'decisive moment.' This photograph showcases his spontaneous and intuitive style, embodying the essence of capturing a fleeting instance that reveals a deeper truth. The... View artist page

William Christenberry

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, William Christenberry (1936 – 2016) grew up in a south where old road signs, deteriorating buildings, and dirt roads shaped his childhood memories. Working in a wide variety of media — including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and assemblage — William Christenberry is known for his artistic exploration of the psychology of place, in particular the Black Belt region of west-central Alabama. Originally focused on painting, William Christenberry moved to New York City in 1961 and there met Walker Evans, whose celebrated FSA photographs of the Depression-era South, many taken in Christenberry’s Hale County, were...

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Lucien Clergue Biography French photographer Lucien Clergue was a pioneering photographer who dedicated his career to elevating photography to a high art during times when the leading artistic medium was painting. Clergue’s work included landscapes, portraits, still lives and studies of the female nude which generated particular acclaim. He is well known for his black-and-white portraits of Pablo Picasso who was an early advocate of Clergue’s practice and became a lifelong friend and collaborator. Clergue’s autobiographical book, Picasso My Friend , looks back on important moments of their relationship.

Lucien Clergue was born in the coastal town of Arles,... View artist page

Bruce Davidson Biography

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, American photographer Bruce Davidson (1933) first worked in a basement darkroom his single mother built when he was 10. Despite studying at Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, Bruce Davidson got drafted into the army and while stationed near Paris, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, the cooperative photography agency Magnum Photos founder and an accomplished photographer himself. By 1958, Bruce Davidson had left the service, started a freelance gig photographing for LIFE magazine, and became a full member at Magnum. Although considered prolific through the stretch of his career, Bruce Davidson's most...

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Roy DeCarva Biography Roy DeCarava was an African American artist known for his photographs portraying Black American life on the streets of cities like New York and Washington, DC. His images illustrate the everyday intimacy between people, places and objects. He is most well-known for his photographs of famous jazz musicians but in addition to those he captured the interactions between ordinary people as well as the mysteriousness and strangeness of city life. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black-and-white photography, advocating for an approach to... View artist page

William Eggleston Biography William Eggleston (American, b.1939) is a photographer who played a pivotal role in elevating color photography to a revered art form suitable for gallery display. Known for his democratic approach to photography, William Eggleston captures the beauty in everyday scenes and objects that often go unnoticed, such as storefronts, cars, and buildings. His work monumentalizes these subjects, imbuing them with a significance that challenges traditional notions of artistry.

Born and raised in the South, William Eggleston grew up in a creative environment as the son of an engineer and a local judge. His early years... View artist page

Elliott Erwitt Biography

American documentary photographer Elliott Erwitt was born Elio Romano Erwitz in 1928 in Paris to Russian parents. Often considered a master of style, Elliott Erwitt's photography is best known for the candor and humor that shines through his black-and-white pictures. Elliott Erwitt began dabbling in photography as a teenager living in Los Angeles, shooting weddings. Later, Elliott Erwitt shot photos for the Army in France and Germany; later living in New York, he met fellow war photographer Robert Capa, who invited him to join the Magnum Photos agency. Elliott Erwitt is responsible for making some of the...

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Walker Evans Biography Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, photographer Walker Evans took up photography in 1928.

Walker Evans is best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration of the U.S. Department of the Interior documenting the effects of The Great Depression. His focus was the government-run resettlement community that housed unemployed West Virginia coal miners.

Much of Walker Evans' change to photography from the FSA period in 1935-36 uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. His goal was to show Americans how the government was helping fix the myriad of problems associated with poverty during The... View artist page

Lee Friedlander Lee Friedlander, an influential American photographer, is known for his innovative scenes of city streets which often feature candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in storefront windows. Friedlander has the ability to organize an endless amount of visual information in dynamic compositions and makes humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life. Friedlander’s street photography captures the abrupt overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes.

Born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, Lee Friedlander began photographing when he was only fourteen years old. He studied photography at the Art Center School in... View artist page

Nan Goldin Biography As a teenager in Boston, Massachusetts, photographer Nan Goldin gained notoriety for her intimate portraits of close friends in the city’s gay and transsexual communities. These friends, often drag queens and other members of marginalized society, became the subjects of her most well-known project, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Later, in New York City and throughout travels in Europe and Asia, her work would continue to champion and celebrate members of these alternative subcultures through storytelling in intimate and autobiographical ways. Born in 1953, Goldin grew up in the suburbs of Boston. In the late 60’s, jarred... View artist page

Horst P. Horst Biography

Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) was in Weissenfels-an-der-Salle, Germany. Originally channeling inspiration for shooting fashion from Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst eventually developed his own style, particularly manipulating light to highlight subjects’ features. By 1931, Horst P. Horst was shooting regularly for French Vogue, as fostered through a friendship with Hoyningen-Huene. Eight years later he made one of his most famous works, Mainbocher Corset, which featured a woman’s back strapped into a corset and published in Vogue. Horst P. Horst primarily worked in the studio, sometimes taking days to strike the right balance of light and...

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Frank Horvat Biography

Frank Horvat is a photographer born on April 28, 1928 in Opatija (then Italy, now Croatia), presently living and working in France. Frank Horvat is best known for his fashion photography, published between the mid 1950s and the end of the 1980s, but his photographic opus includes photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, nature and sculpture. Photographer Frank Horvat has extensively traveled and speaks and writes fluently in four languages. In 1988, he produced a major book of interviews with fellow photographers (such as Édouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Sarah Moon, Don McCullin, Helmut Newton, Marc Riboud). At the beginning of...

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André Kertész Biography André Kertész (1894 – 1985) is considered one of the seminal figures of 20th century photography. He is regarded as one of the fathers of photojournalism and street photography but is also known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic compositions using unorthodox camera angles, distortions, and style. By combining a seemingly artless spontaneity with a sophisticated understanding of composition, André Kertész developed and fostered a unique and intimate style of image making. Born Kertész Andor in Budapest, he received his first camera in 1912. At the early age of 18, he began experimenting with the medium by... View artist page

William Klein Biography

Born in New York City a year before the Depression started, French photographer and filmmaker William Klein’s (1928 - present) first forays into art were through painting. Although he eventually switched gears towards the camera, he never formally studied photography, which explains his abstract approach. William Klein won his first camera during a poker game in 1946 while part of the U.S. Army stationed in Germany. He worked a brief stint as assistant to French painter and sculptor Fernand Léger’s in Paris in 1948. William Klein’s photography in fashion has appeared in magazines, books and documentary and...

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Jacques-Henri Lartigue Biography Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was born in Courbevoie, France, but he grew up in Paris. His father, a businessman and passionate amateur photographer, gave him his first camera at the age of seven. He was very quickly attracted by movement and, after mastering the technique, took his first ‘snapshots’ of tennis, swimming, bobsledding, and other games.

From that point forward, Lartigue constantly took photos as a passion in his childhood, from automobile excursions and family holidays to crazy inventions by his older brother, Maurice. Born into wealth, the two brothers were fascinated by cars, aviation, and sports... View artist page

Danny Lyon Biography Danny Lyon is a self-made American filmmaker and photographer. He's also known for his writing skills, which he uses to compliment his images. Danny received a BA in history from the University of Chicago in 1963. He also published his first photographs for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where he served as a staff photographer in the same year. His photos were featured in The Movement , a documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

Later, Lyon moved on to writing books. His first publication was The Bikeriders (1967), which is a study of outlaw... View artist page

Sally Mann Biography

Born in Lexington, Virginia, Sally Mann began to study photography in the late 1960s, attending the Ansel Adams Gallery’s Yosemite Workshops in Yosemite National Park, California, and the Putney School and Bennington College, both in Vermont. She received a BA from Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia, in 1974 and an MA in creative writing the following year. At a moment when many other photographers were creating large-scale color prints, Mann looked to photography’s past, investigating the visual and metaphorical potential of employing nineteenth-century technologies. She has long used an 8 x 10 bellows camera and has explored platinum,...

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Richard Misrach Biography Richard Misrach (b. 1949) is one of the most influential photographers working today. For the past 50 years, he has used visually stunning, large-scale color vistas to address human intervention on the natural world. Perhaps best known for his Desert Cantos , an ongoing series depicting desert landscapes that the artist began in 1979, Richard Misrach is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of large format color photography.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Richard Misrach studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, before turning to photography as a way of documenting his involvement... View artist page

Gordon Parks Biography

Humanitarian photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born into segregated Kansas in 1912. Gordon Parks' photography style developed from a fellowship chronicling extreme poverty and social conditions for the Farm Security Administration, under the mentorship of Roy Stryker. Gordon Parks also worked as a filmmaker and memoirist, breaking color boundaries across the board. Gordon Parks captured arresting images highlighting deeply problematic oppression and racism across the nation, including the notable American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942), featuring F.S.A. chairperson Ella Watson posed with a broom and mop, staring blankly ahead and standing in front of an unfurled American flag....

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Irving Penn Biography Irving Penn, an American photographer most notably known for his more than sixty years of work and sophisticated fashion images in numerous issues of Vogue magazine, was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. His rise in art and photography began when he first attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts in 1934. While he initially viewed himself as an aspiring painter, his career course shifted when he began studying design with Alexey Brodovitch, his teacher and mentor. During his time studying with Brodovitch, Irving Penn studied painting, drawing, industrial arts, and graphics. This encounter ultimately allowed Irving... View artist page

Alex Prager Biography Alex Prager is a known American art photographer and filmmaker, based in Los Angeles, California, who draws inspiration from a wide range of influences and references, including Old Hollywood aesthetics, pop culture, and street photography. Her works are elaborately staged scenes that merge past and contemporary sources to create a sense of ambiguity. Much of Prager's photographs invite those viewing her work to 'complete the story' and speculate the narrative. A set of popular series, Polyester (2007), The Big Valley (2008) , and Week-End (2009), depicts images of women expressing distress, despair, or contemplation that implants an... View artist page

Ben Shahn Biography Ben Shahn (1898-1969) is renowned as one of the leading American artists of the Social Realist movement in the mid-twentieth century. Shahn originally began his career as a painter, lithographer, and muralist, but it was his foray into photography during the Great Depression that cemented his artistic legacy in American history. Shahn’s striking photographs from the 1930s confront viewers with an incisive commentary on poverty, injustice, and mass unemployment in rural farming communities across America. Aligning with his realist style, Ben Shahn’s Depression-era pictures showed life as it was, not as his subjects or viewers wished it... View artist page

Mark Steinmetz Biography

Mark Steinmetz (b. 1961) is an Athens, Georgia-based photographer whose work captures black-and-white images of Southern Americana as seen in urban, rural and suburban landscapes. “I like to stress the poetry and ambiance of a place, while still trying to be truthful,” he has remarked, and his candid shots of everyday life reflect this statement. Examples of this sentiment are strikingly portrayed in Steinmetz's new photo series Terminus, showing the everyday moments of people passing through airports. “At the airport, people from all over the world and from all walks of life can be found in the...

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Maria Svarbova Biography Maria Svarbova (b. 1988) currently lives in Slovakia. Despite studying restoration and archeology, her preferred artistic medium is photography. From 2010 to the present, the immediacy of Maria Svarbova's photographic instinct continues to garner international acclaim and is setting new precedents in photographic expression. The recipient of several prestigious awards, Maria Svarbova's solo and group exhibitions have placed her among the vanguard of her contemporaries, attracting features in Vogue,Forbes, The Guardian, and publications around the world; Maria Svarbova photography is frequently in the limelight of social media. Maria Svarbova's reputation also earned her a commission for... View artist page

Joseph Szabo Biography

Joseph Szabo is a teacher, photographer and author who began his photographic studies at Pratt Institute where he received an MFA degree in 1968. Joseph Szabo taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972 — 1999 and at the International Center of Photography in New York since 1978.
Joseph Szabo has been photographing his teen-age students for the past twenty-five years and has perfectly captured the ambivalence of that time of life. In 1978, his book on adolescence Almost Grown was published by Harmony Books and acclaimed by the American Library Association and placed on...

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Shawn Theodore Biography Shawn Theodore (b. 1970) is an award-winning photographer whose work blends the real and mythological as it explores African American and African Diasporic life within disappearing Black American neighborhoods. Set to the visual texture of Black life, Shawn Theodore’s work illustrates physical and spiritual resistance to systematic oppression and creates a metaphorical connection to African legacies and traditions while doing so. In this way, Theodore's self-defined 'Afromythology' portrays his work empowering his subjects and capturing their real and imagined histories. His visuals ignite broad conversations about the role of the photographer, its duality in shaping the agency... View artist page

Garry Winogrand Biography Garry Winogrand, called “the central photographer of his generation” in 1978 by John Szarkowski, is considered one of the most influential photographers of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in New York, where he lived and worked for much of his life, Winogrand studied painting at City College and Columbia University. He then went on to study photography at The New School with Alexey Brodovich, the art director at Harper’s Bazaar. He got his start in commercial photography but soon found his photographic passion was in making his own pictures on the streets of New... View artist page