PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: photography
American photographer
Alfred Stieglitz, art dealer, publisher, advocate for the Modernist movement in the arts, and, arguably, the most important photographer of his time. Stieglitz was the son of Edward Stieglitz, a German...
American photographer
Edward Weston, major American photographer of the early to mid-20th century, best known for his carefully composed, sharply focused images of natural forms, landscapes, and nudes. His work influenced a...
American photographer
Walker Evans, American photographer whose influence on the evolution of ambitious photography during the second half of the 20th century was perhaps greater than that of any other figure. He rejected the...
American photographer
Ansel Adams, American photographer who was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. He is also perhaps the most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United...
French photographer
Eugène Atget, French commercial photographer who specialized in photographing the architecture and associated arts of Paris and its environs at the turn of the 20th century. Very few biographical facts...
American photographer
Edward Steichen, American photographer who achieved distinction in a remarkably broad range of roles. In his youth he was perhaps the most talented and inventive photographer among those working to win...
German artist
John Heartfield, German artist best known for his agitprop photomontages—collages of text and imagery found in mass-produced media—and his role in the development of the Dada movement in Berlin. The child...
French photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer whose humane, spontaneous photographs helped establish photojournalism as an art form. His theory that photography can capture the meaning beneath outward appearance...
American photographer
Garry Winogrand, American street photographer known for his spontaneous images of people in public engaged in everyday life, particularly of New Yorkers during the 1960s. His unusual camera angles, uncanny...
English astronomer
Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet, English astronomer and successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, in the field of stellar and nebular observation and discovery. An only child, John was educated briefly...
Hungarian-born American photographer
André Kertész, Hungarian-born American photographer known for his lyrical and formally rigorous pictures of everyday life. One of the most-inventive photographers of the 20th century, Kertész set the standard...
German-born photographer
Ilse Bing, German-born photographer known for her early mastery of the lightweight 35-mm Leica camera and for her intricately composed street photographs and self-portraits. Bing attended the University...
French photographer
Gisèle Freund, German-born French photographer noted especially for her portraits of artists and writers and for working in colour film in its nascency. Freund was raised in an affluent Jewish household...
American photographer
Annie Leibovitz, American photographer renowned for her dramatic, quirky, and iconic portraits of a great variety of celebrities. Her signature style is crisp and well lighted. Leibovitz’s father had a...
American socialite and photographer
Marian Adams, American social arbiter who was widely acknowledged for her wit, as an accomplished photographer in the early 1880s, and as the wife of historian Henry Adams. Marian Hooper—called Clover...
French photographer and painter
Dora Maar, French photographer and Surrealist artist whose career and accomplishments were overshadowed during her lifetime by the details of her affair with Pablo Picasso. Her work was resurrected and...
American photographer
Taryn Simon, American photographer known for her formal, richly textured images, usually captured with an antique large-format camera. She typically assembled her photographs around a predetermined theme...
American photographer and painter
Man Ray, photographer, painter, and filmmaker who was the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements. The son of Jewish immigrants—his father was a tailor and his mother...
American artist
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cuban-born American sculptor, photographer, and conceptual artist known for work in a variety of media that addresses issues of identity, desire, originality, loss, the metaphor...
American photographer
William Eggleston, American photographer whose straightforward depictions of everyday objects and scenes, many of them in the southern United States, were noted for their vivid colours, precise composition,...
American artist
John Baldessari, American artist whose work in altered and adjusted photographic imagery and video were central to the development of conceptual art in the United States. Baldessari received a B.A. at...
American photographer
Paul Strand, photographer whose work influenced the emphasis on sharp-focused, objective images in 20th-century American photography. When he was 17 years old, Strand began to study photography with Lewis...
American photographer
Berenice Abbott, photographer best known for her photographic documentation of New York City in the late 1930s and for her preservation of the works of Eugène Atget. Abbott studied briefly at the Ohio...
American photographer
Dorothea Lange, American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography. Lange studied photography...
British artist
Yinka Shonibare, British artist of Nigerian heritage known for his examination of such ideas as authenticity, identity, colonialism, and power relations in often-ironic drawings, paintings, sculptures,...
American photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe, American photographer who was noted for austere photographs of flowers, celebrities, and male nudes; among the latter were some that proved controversial because of their explicitly...
American photographer
Margaret Bourke-White, American photographer known for her extensive contributions to photojournalism, particularly for her Life magazine work. She is recognized as having been the first female documentary...
Italian photographer
Tina Modotti, photographer who was noted for her symbolic close-ups and images of Mexican workers. Modotti spent most of her childhood in Austria, where her parents were migrant labourers. The family returned...
American photographer
W. Eugene Smith, American photojournalist noted for his compelling photo-essays, which were characterized by a strong sense of empathy and social conscience. At age 14 Smith began to use photography to...
Japanese photographer
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Japanese photographer whose realistic images of intangible or impossible phenomena challenged the understanding of photography as an “objective” art form. Sugimoto received a B.A. in...
American photographer
Diane Arbus, American photographer, best known for her compelling, often disturbing, portraits of people from the edges of society. Diane Nemerov was the daughter of Gertrude Russek and David Nemerov,...
American photographer
Sally Mann, American photographer whose powerful images of childhood, sexuality, and death were often deemed controversial. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, Robert Munger, a physician...
British photographer
Eadweard Muybridge, English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. Edward James Muggeridge adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge,...
Mexican photographer
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, photographer who was most noted for his poetic images of Mexican people and places. He was part of the artistic renaissance that occurred after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Although...
Russian artist
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko, Russian painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer who was a dedicated leader of the Constructivist movement. Rodchenko studied art at the Kazan School of Art in Odessa...
American photographer
Minor White, American photographer and editor whose efforts to extend photography’s range of expression greatly influenced creative photography in the mid-20th century. White took up photography while...
American photographer
Mathew Brady, well-known 19th-century American photographer who was celebrated for his portraits of politicians and his photographs of the American Civil War. After training with the artist William Page...
American photographer
Gertrude Käsebier, American portrait photographer who was one of the founders of the influential Photo-Secession group and who is best known for her evocative images of women and domestic scenes. In 1864...
Chilean-born artist
Alfredo Jaar, Chilean-born conceptual artist whose work probes the relationship between the First World and the Third World. Jaar lived on the island of Martinique between the ages of 6 and 16. When at...
American photographer
William Henry Jackson, American photographer and artist whose landscape photographs of the American West helped popularize the region. Jackson grew up in far-northeastern New York state, where he learned...
American photographer
Cindy Sherman, American photographer known for her images—particularly her elaborately “disguised” self-portraits—that comment on social role-playing and sexual stereotypes. Sherman grew up on Long Island,...
American photographer
Carleton E. Watkins, American photographer best known for his artistic documentation of the landscape of the American West. He also produced images of industrial sites in that region. (For further information...
German photographer
Thomas Demand, German photographer known for his large-scale photographs of paper-and-cardboard reconstructions of indoor scenes. On initial viewing, the images appear to portray “real” settings, but closer...
American photographer and curator
John Szarkowski, American photographer and curator who served as the visionary director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from 1962 through 1991 and demonstrated that photography...
American photographer
Nan Goldin, American photographer noted for visual narratives detailing her own world of addictive and sexual activities. After leaving home at age 13, Goldin lived in foster homes and attended an alternative...
American photographer
Lewis Hine, American photographer who used his art to bring social ills to public attention. Hine was trained as a sociologist. He began to portray the immigrants who crowded onto New York’s Ellis Island...
Chinese artist
Zhang Huan, Chinese artist known for both his early photographed performance art that often showcased his own naked body and for his later production of a great variety of large mass-produced objects....
French writer, caricaturist, and photographer
Nadar, French writer, caricaturist, and photographer who is remembered primarily for his photographic portraits, which are considered to be among the best done in the 19th century. As a young man, he studied...
Japanese artist
Morimura Yasumasa, Japanese artist known for his large-scale self-portraits that were often superimposed on art-historical images or on pictures of iconic individuals. After graduating (1978) from Kyōto...
Canadian musician and photographer
Bryan Adams, Canadian rock singer-songwriter, photographer, and social activist whose hit albums Cuts Like a Knife (1983) and Reckless (1984) made him one of the most popular and successful recording artists...