PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: photography
American photographer
Edward S. Curtis was an American photographer and chronicler of Native American peoples whose work perpetuated an influential image of Indians as a “vanishing race.” The monumental The North American Indian...
American photographer
Alfred Stieglitz was an 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...
Iranian-born American artist
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born American artist whose photography, video, and feature films investigate how women find freedom in repressive societies. About her work, Neshat stated: “Everything I’ve...
American photographer
Edward Weston was a 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...
American photographer
Ansel Adams was an American photographer who was one of the most important landscape photographers of the 20th century. He is also perhaps one of the most widely known and beloved photographer in the history...
American photographer
Walker Evans was an 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...
French writer, photographer, Surrealist, and performance artist
Claude Cahun was a French writer, photographer, Surrealist, and performance artist who was largely written out of art history until the late 1980s, when her photographs were included in an exhibition of...
German artist
Hannah Höch was a German artist, the only woman associated with the Berlin Dada group, known for her provocative photomontage compositions that explore Weimar-era perceptions of gender and ethnic differences....
French photographer
Eugène Atget was a 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...
American photographer, artist, and model
Lee Miller was an American photographer, Surrealist artist, and model. She might have been known primarily as the muse and lover of the Surrealist artist Man Ray had her son, Antony Penrose, not discovered...
American photographer
Edward Steichen was an 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...
German artist
John Heartfield was a 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...
German photographer
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer known for his monumental digitally manipulated photographs that examine consumer culture and the busyness of contemporary life. His unique compositional strategies...
American photographer, writer, and educator
Dawoud Bey is an American photographer, writer, and educator known for his sensitive large-scale portraits and candid street photographs of everyday Black American life. His later work probes the psychic...
American photographer
Deana Lawson is an American photographer best known for her large-scale staged photographs that explore Black identity. Her subjects are often strangers she comes across in her everyday life—on the train,...
American multimedia artist
Rashid Johnson is an American multimedia artist whose work explores the anxieties of the modern world, intellectual and artistic lineages, and the African American experience. Early in his career Johnson...
American photographer
Garry Winogrand was an 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,...
German photographer
Thomas Struth is a German photographer known best for his series Museum Photographs, monumental colour images of people viewing canonical works of art in museums. His photographs are characterized by their...
French photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer whose humane, spontaneous photographs helped establish photojournalism as an art form. His theory that photography can capture the meaning beneath outward...
American architectural critic, author, and photographer
John Margolies was an American architectural critic, author, and photographer who, from 1969 to 2008, traveled more than 100,000 miles across American towns and cities, capturing thousands of images of...
American photographer, musician, and entrepreneur
Linda McCartney was an American photographer and musician who was widely known for her marriage to musician Paul McCartney, a former member of the immensely popular rock band the Beatles. Alongside her...
Hungarian-born American photographer
André Kertész was a 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...
English astronomer
Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet was an 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...
German-born photographer
Ilse Bing was a 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...
Bohemian-born British photographer, teacher, and writer
Lucia Moholy was a Bohemian-born British photographer, teacher, and writer best known for her documentary photographs of the Bauhaus, the noted German school of design, architecture, and applied arts....
British sculptor, artist, and photographer
Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, land artist, and photographer known for ephemeral works created outdoors from natural materials found on-site. As an adolescent growing up in Yorkshire, England,...
American photographer
Lee Friedlander is an American photographer known for his asymmetrical black-and-white pictures of the American “social landscape”—everyday people, places, and things. Friedlander’s interest in photography...
British artist
Yinka Shonibare is a 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,...
Ethiopian photographer, educator, and entrepreneur
Aïda Muluneh is an Ethiopian photographer, educator, and entrepreneur known for her Afrofuturist photography that incorporates vibrant colours and body painting to create surreal scenes. Muluneh’s work...
French photographer
Gisèle Freund was a 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 author, photographer, and film director
Gordon Parks was an American author, photographer, and film director who documented African American life. The youngest of 15 children born into a tenant farming family, Parks grew up in poverty and attended...
American photographer
Lewis Hine was an American photographer who used his art to bring social ills to public attention. Hine is perhaps best known for his photographs documenting child labor in the early 20th century. Hine...
American photographer and optician
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer and optician known for his photographs in which family members and friends appear wearing grotesque masks. Meatyard served in the U.S. Navy during World...
American photographer
Annie Leibovitz is an American photographer renowned for her offbeat, often dramatic portraits of celebrities. Her signature style is crisp and well lighted. Leibovitz’s father had a military career, and...
French photographer
Charles Nègre was a French painter and photographer best known for his photographs of Paris street scenes and architectural monuments, notably the Notre-Dame and Chartres cathedrals. Nègre first went to...
French-born American photographer and filmmaker
Elliott Erwitt was a French-born American photographer and filmmaker known for his uncanny ability to capture the humour and irony of everyday life. Erwitt (whose family members had changed their surname...
American photographer
Taryn Simon is an American photographer known for her formal, richly textured images, usually captured with an antique large-format camera. She typically assembles her photographs around a predetermined...
American artist
Nancy Holt was an American land artist known for her large site-specific works and her role in the development of Land Art in the 1960s. She also worked in film, video, and photography and created many...
American photographer
William Eggleston is an 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,...
French photographer and painter
Dora Maar was a 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...
American artist
Bruce Nauman is an American artist whose work in a broad range of mediums made him a major figure in conceptual art. Nauman was educated at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (B.A., 1964), and the University...
American artist
Lisa Anne Auerbach is an American artist probably best known for her knitwear, though she works in a number of media, including photography, performance art, and zine production. Auerbach graduated in...
German photographer
Wolfgang Tillmans German photographer whose images of the everyday span from street photography to portraiture to landscape and still life to abstraction. In 2000 he became the first non-British artist...
American artist
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a 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 artist
Barbara Kruger is an American artist who challenged cultural assumptions by manipulating images and text in her photographic compositions. Kruger attended Syracuse (New York) University and continued her...
American photographer
Nan Goldin is an 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...
American photographer
Vivian Maier was an American amateur street photographer who lived her life in obscurity as a nanny and caregiver in the suburbs of Chicago while producing an expansive body of photographic work that became...
American actress
Candice Bergen is an American actress, writer, and photojournalist who was best known for playing the smart but prickly and often unreasonable title character in the sitcom Murphy Brown (1988–98, 2018)....
American photographer
Paul Strand was a 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...
American photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe was an 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...