Steve McCurry is an American editorial photographer responsible for some of the most iconic cultural journalism of our time. “Most of my photos are grounded in people,” McCurry has explained. “I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face.” He achieved world renown with his 1984 photograph Afghan Girl, a striking depiction of a young refugee with mesmerizing green eyes. The image first appeared on the June 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine, along with many other photographs that McCurry shot while on assignment in Afghanistan. The photographer was able to covertly enter the country by disguising himself as a local, arriving immediately before the Soviet Union invasion to document the ensuing chaos and displacement. He was eventually able to travel back into Pakistan with film sewn into his clothing, thereby avoiding its confiscation. Born on February 24, 1950 in Darby, PA, McCurry went on to study theater at Penn State University, where he worked on its collegiate newspaper as a staff photographer. Traveling all over the world on assignment, McCurry has continued to cover armed conflicts including the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the Afghan Civil War.

Andres Serrano is an American artist known for his large-scale photographs imbued with religious symbolism. Serrano is best known for his image Piss Christ (1987), a now-infamous pictures of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Serrano’s art brings together spirituality with physicality in a way that has garnered the artist considerable controversy, although it is not always intended to shock. “That’s what happens when you do work that is emotionally provocative, it polarizes people on both sides of the fence,” the artist has said. Born on August 15, 1950 in New York, NY, Serrano is from a Honduran and Afro-Cuban background and was raised by a devout Roman Catholic family. The tenets of Catholicism’s taking the body and blood of Christ has played a major role in Serrano’s artwork. Though he never received a formal art education, he did study at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art during his teenage years.

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and filmmaker whose self-portraits offer critiques of gender and identity. What made Sherman famous is the use of her own body in roles or personas in her work, with her seminal series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) being particularly important. These black-and-white photographs feature the artist herself as a model in various costumes and poses, and are her portrayals of female stereotypes found in film, television, and advertising. Similar to Barbara Kruger, Sherman examines and distorts femininity as a social construct.“I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite,” she reflected. “It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.” Born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ, the artist abandoned painting for photography while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1976, moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. In addition to the Untitled Film Stills series, she has continued to explore women as subject matter, often donning elaborate disguises in large-scale color photographs, throughout her career

Edward Weston was a seminal American photographer whose radical approach to composition, lighting, and form changed the history of the medium. The photographs Shell (1927), and Pepper No. 30 (1930), evinces Weston’s ability to transform landscapes, portraits, and still lifes into visual enigmas. “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh,” the artist once stated. Born on March 24, 1886 in Highland Park, IL, he was given his first camera by his father at the age of 16, sparking a lifelong interest. Weston enrolled at the Illinois College of Photography after having failed to start a photography career in California without a degree. Finishing the course in six months, he returned to California better prepared and began working as an assistant in portrait studios around Los Angeles. The artist opened his own studio in 1909, where he would work for the next 20 years

Gordon Parks was a self-taught photographer, writer, composer, and filmmaker. Parks is remembered as the first African American photographer who worked for Vogue and Life magazines, best known for his documentary photojournalism of the 1940s through 1970s. He notably captured iconic images of the civil rights movement, investigating important turning points in inner cities. He was born on November 30, 1912 in Fort Scott, KS into a farming family, and grew up experiencing segregation and racist violence firsthand. He bought his first camera at the age of 25 at a Seattle pawnshop, and in 1940 moved to Chicago where he developed a portrait business. In 1948, his photographic essay on a Harlem gang leader earned Parks a job as a photographer for Life, where he continued to work until 1972. In addition to his work as a photographer, Parks also became a successful filmmaker, directing Shaft, one of the most successful movies of 1971, and writer, authoring the book A Choice of Weapons (1966) that chronicled his journey as a photographer. His awards include the American Society of Magazine Photographers’ Photographer of the Year in 1960, the Congress of Racial Equality Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, as well as over 20 honorary doctorates. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. acquired his archive in 1995. He died on March 7, 2006 in New York, NY.

Francesca Woodman was an American photographer known for her black-and-white self-portraits. Despite her short career, which ended with her suicide at the age of 22, Woodman produced over 800 untitled prints. Influenced by Surrealism and Conceptual Art, her work often featured recurring symbolic motifs such as birds, mirrors, and skulls. The artist’s exploration of sexuality and the body is often compared to both Hans Bellmer and Man Ray. Woodman’s work is also characterized by her use of long shutter speed and double exposure, the blurred image creating a sense of movement and urgency, “Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …?” Woodman once stated. Born on April 3, 1958 in Boulder, CO to the artists George and Betty Woodman, she went on to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and traveled to Rome as part of its honors program in 1977. While in Rome, she made some of her most poetic and provocative works. Moving to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in photography, the next two years proved to be troubled for the artist. A lackluster response to her photography and a failed relationship pushed her into a deep depression. The artist jumped to her death from a loft window on January 19, 1981 in New York, NY.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer best known for her intimate black-and-white portraits. Arbus often photographed people on the fringes of society, including the mentally ill, transgender people, and circus performers. Interested in probing questions of identity, Arbus’s Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967), simultaneously captured the underlying differences and physical resemblance of twin sisters. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” she once mused. Born Diane Nemerov on March 24, 1923 in New York, NY, she was raised in a wealthy family, which enabled her to pursue artistic interests from an early age. She first saw the photographs of Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, and Eugène Atget while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery with her husband Allan Arbus in 1941. During the mid-1940s, the married couple began a commercial photography venture that contributed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Burned out on commercial work by the 1950s, Arbus began roaming the streets of New York with her camera, documenting the city through its citizens. These images were later shown alongside those of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “New Documents” (1967). Having struggled with depressive episodes throughout her life, Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of 48. In 1972, a year after her death, the first major retrospective of Arbus’ work took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the heroin-addicted subculture. Her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year. “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody—it's a caress,” she said of the medium. “I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” Born Nancy Goldin on September 12, 1953 in Washington, D.C., the artist began taking photographs as a teenager to cherish her relationships with those she photographed, as well as a political tool to inform the public of issues that were important to her. Influenced both by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin she saw in magazines, as well as the revelatory portraits of Diane Arbus and August Sander, Goldin captured herself and her friends at their most vulnerable moments, as seen in her seminal photobook Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996).

Sally Mann is an American photographer known for her black-and-white portraits of her family and documentation of the landscape of the American South. Since the 1970s, she produced a series of photographic portraits, landscapes, and still life’s and is best known for her intimate portraits of her family, including her three young children and husband. Similarly to David Hamilton, Mann has caused controversy with her nude photographs causing repeated outcries and calls for censorship. The complexity of her photographs, including her most famous series Immediate Family (1984–1994), which depicts her three children, who were then all under the age of 10, explores the time between childhood and adolescence. “As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs,” she reflected. “And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.” Born Sally Turner Munger on May 1, 1951 in Lexington, VA, she received her BA and later her MA from Hollins College in Virginia before working as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University during the mid-1970s.

Dawoud Bey (born 1953) is an American photographer and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago.

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer best known for staging cinematic scenes of suburbia to dramatic effect. His surreal images are often melancholic, offering ambiguous narrative suggestions and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. Working with large production teams to scout and shoot his images, his photographs have become increasingly complex as if it were for a motion picture production, including its painstaking preparation of elaborate sets, lighting, and cast, as seen in his seminal series Beneath the Roses (2003–2008) and Twilight (1998–2001). “My pictures are about a search for a moment—a perfect moment,” Crewdson has explained. Born on September 26, 1962 in Brooklyn, NY, the artist went to the State University of New York at Purchase College where he studied with Jan Groover and Laurie Simmons. In 1988, he graduated from Yale University with an MFA in photography, and since 1993 has served on its faculty, currently as the director of its graduate studies in photography. He has cited Steven Spielberg, Diane Arbus, and Edward Hopper as influences to his practice.

Man Ray was an American avant-garde artist and leading figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements. A pioneer in painting, film, and collage, Man Ray is best known for his black-and-white photographs. His Larmes (Tears) (1930–1932) is a hallmark example of his imaginative photographs, featuring a woman with glass droplets placed on her face which resemble tears. “My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection,” he once stated. Born Emmanuel Radnitsky on August 27, 1890 in South Philadelphia, PA, the artists family moved to Brooklyn, NY, when he was young. While living in New York, Man Ray befriended Marcel Duchamp and picked up photography through his association with Alfred Stieglitz. In 1921, the artist moved to Paris, where he joined the French cohort of Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson. After waiting out World War II in New York, Man Ray would return to Europe in 1951. His popular autobiography Self Portrait was published in 1963. Man Ray died on November 18, 1976 in Paris, France.

William Eggleston is one of the most influential photographers of the latter half of the 20th century. His portraits and landscapes of the American South reframed the history of the medium and its relationship to color photography. “I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography,” Eggleston explained. “Not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it.” Born on July 27, 1939 in Memphis, TN, Eggleston’s initial style was influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. He attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College, and the University of Mississippi, but never graduated. The artist’s experiments with color film during the 1960s challenged the conventions of photography, since at the time, dye-transfer photography was considered beneath serious photographers, relegated to commercial prints and tourist snapshots

Robert Capa was an American-Hungarian photographer who captured five wars over the course of his lifetime. Capa’s images of the Normandy Invasion on D-Day redefined photojournalism. “It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one,” he once said. Born Endre Friedmann on October 22, 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, Capa left his home country at the age of 18, finding work as a photojournalist in post-World War I Berlin. During this time, he concealed his Jewish heritage with a pseudonym based on his childhood nickname “Cápa,” or “Shark.” Throughout his life, he covered many important historical events, including the rise of Soviet Communism, the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and a full survey of the politics and atrocities of World War II. Capa's photographs are recognized across the globe for their critical role in shaping public remembrance of these events. In 1947, he co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris with fellow photographers David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and George Rodger. Capa died tragically on May 25, 1954 after stepping on a landmine while documenting the First Indochina War in Thai Binh, Vietnam. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others.

Richard Avedon was an influential American fashion and fine art photographer. His iconic portraits of celebrities, spanned more than half of the 20th century, and included Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, The Beatles, Andy Warhol, and Tupac Shakur. “My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph,” he once observed. Perhaps Avedon’s biggest stylistic impact was his decision to have his subjects emote—initially working during a time when the prevailing trend had been to present portraits that were still and subdued, his photographs stood out with their intimate viewpoint. Born on May 15, 1923 in New York, NY, he studied under Alexey Brodovitch at his Design Laboratory at The New School. Avedon got his start working for magazines, landing a job at Vogue in 1964, first as a staff photographer under famed editor Diana Vreeland, and then as its head photographer from 1973–1988. Outside of his fashion work, Avedon is also known for his series capturing American Western figures such as drifters, miners, cowboys, and others living on the edges of society. A series of these images was later published as the book In the American West (1985), which is widely considered a seminal work in the history of photography. He died in San Antonio, TX while on assignment on October 1, 2004 at the age of 81.

Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and activist who works in photography, video, and installation. Born in Durban, South Africa, on July 19, 1972, Muholi is the youngest of five children. The artist had their first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004, and completed their MFA in 2009 from Ryerson University in Toronto, with a thesis on black lesbian identity and politics in South Africa. Muholi's work is dedicated to increasing the visibility of black LGBTQ+ people. South Africa and other African countries still have rampant occurrences of homophobic violence, and Muholi aims to uplift LGBTQ+ people in these countries through their work. Muholi's work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer and filmmaker known as a pioneer of street photography. His dramatic black-and-white works are among the most iconic images of the 20th century. The artist is perhaps best known for his 1952 book The Decisive Moment, originally titled Images à la Sauvette (Images on the Run), the book explored his notion of photography as a candid medium. “To take a photograph means to recognize, simultaneously and within a fraction of a second‚ both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning,” Cartier-Bresson once explained. Born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, France, he studied painting with André Lhote before becoming a photojournalist in the 1930s. He counted Man Ray, André Kertész, and Eugène Atget as major influences to his practice. Over the decades that followed, he travelled all over the world capturing scenes in Africa, Europe, and Mexico. Joining the French resistance during the Nazi occupation, the photographer was captured and spent three years in a prison camp. In 1947, the artist helped found the cooperative agency Magnum Photos with Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandiver. Cartier-Bresson went on to receive the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1981 and the Hasselblad Award the following year. He died on August 3, 2004 in Montjustin, France at the age of 95.

Alfred Stieglitz was a renowned photographer who contributed greatly to the development of Modernism during the 20th century. Championing photography as an art form at a time when it was considered a mere form of documentation, he co-founded the journal Camera Work with Edward Steichen and passionately defended the importance of the medium. “I have all but killed myself for photography,” he once declared. “My passion for it is greater than ever. It’s 40 years that I have fought its fight—and I’ll fight to the finish—single handed and without money if need be.” Born on January 1, 1864 in Hoboken, NJ, he received part of his education in Germany, studying mechanical engineering at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule, and later photochemistry after returning to the United States in 1890. Technique was important to Stieglitz, and he took great care in creating his platinum prints with close attention paid to composition and tonality. Among his most famous images are the portraits of his wife the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz died on July 13, 1946 in New York, NY.

Walker Evans was a renowned American photographer known for his black-and-white images documenting the impact of the Great Depression. As an artist, Evans disliked the formal photography like that of Alfred Stieglitz. Instead, he aimed to capture the quotidian beauty and diaristic events of daily life. “I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to,” he once explained. “If the thing is there, why, there it is.” Born on November 3, 1903 in St. Louis, MO, he went on to attend Williams College in Massachusetts before relocating to New York to pursue a career in writing. By 1929, he had switched from writing to the medium of photography. President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Farm Security Administration commissioned Evans, along with a number of other photographers, to travel the country to capture how the Great Depression was affecting communities.

Vivian Maier was an American street photographer whose body of work was only discovered after her death. Maier took over 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, capturing the people and architecture of Chicago on a Rolleiflex camera as she walked the city on her days off. Born on February 1, 1926 in New York, she moved to Chicago in 1956, working as a nanny for wealthy families in the North Shore neighborhood. Her work has been compared to Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, both for her spontaneous shooting style and for her fascination with human behavior. She died in Chicago on April 21, 2009, and two years before her death, a storage unit with her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film was auctioned to three separate buyers. One of them, John Maloof, began sharing a selection of Maier's images in 2009 on his blog, generating significant public and critical interest. Maloof went on to produce an award-winning 2013 documentary about the elusive photographer, Finding Vivian Maier, as well as authoring the 2014 monograph Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found.

Irving Penn was an American photographer known for both his commercial and fine art work. Using both large format and 35mm cameras, he regularly turned his lens on street debris, animal skulls, and flowers, in addition to his glamorous images of celebrities. “I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination,” he once reflected. “It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.” Born on June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, NJ, he studied art and design under Alexey Brodovitch at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia before moving to New York in 1938. In New York, Penn worked as Brodovitch’s assistant at Harper’s Bazaar magazine a painter and illustrator. Around this time, he began taking black-and-white photographs with his newly purchased Rolliflex camera. In 1943, Alexander Liberman, the director of Vogue magazine, hired Penn as a designer for the publication, while also encouraging him to pursue a career in fashion photography. By the early 1950s, the artist had established himself as an important photographer in the industry

Elliott Erwitt is an American documentary photographer considered one of the masters of his medium. Known for his candid and often humorous black-and-white images, Erwitt is responsible for some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, including indelible portraits of figures like Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, and Richard Nixon. Over the course of his career, the artist has published numerous photobooks, often with a particular focus on dogs. “The work I care about is terribly simple,” Erwitt remarked in 1988. “I observe, I try to entertain, but above all I want pictures that are emotion. Little else interests me in photography.” Born on July 26, 1928 in Paris, France, his family emigrated to the United States in 1939. He went on to study photography at Los Angeles Community College and filmmaking at the New School for Social Research, and later worked as a photojournalist.

Ansel Adams was an iconic American photographer known for his awe-inspiring black-and-white photographs of the American West. Carefully composed and technically precise, the artist’s picturesque images of Yosemite National Park are some of the most iconic works in the history of the medium. “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space,” he once mused. “I know of no sculpture, painting, or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters.” Born on February 20, 1902 in San Francisco, CA, the artist trained as a concert pianist before turning to photography in 1930. Along with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, Adams formed Group f/64 with the goal of elevating photography to a high art at a time when it was only considered a form of documentation. A committed environmentalist, he traveled throughout the country to capture the grandeur of natural sites. Adams died on April 22, 1984 in Monterey, CA at the age of 82.

Garry Winogrand was a legendary American photographer, regarded as highly influential for his street photographs documenting the social and cultural landscape of mid-century metropolitan United States. Shot almost exclusively in black and white, Winogrand's images provide a slice of 20th-century American culture, replete with all the nightlife, excitement, heartbreak, trauma, and banality that constitutes life. “Photography is not about the thing photographed,” he famously said. “It is about how that thing looks photographed.” Born on January 14, 1928 in the Bronx, NY, he studied painting and photography at City College and Columbia University and graduated in 1948, embarking on a commercial and personal photographic career.

Andreas Gursky is a German artist known for his large-scale digitally manipulated images. Similar in scope to early 19th-century landscape paintings, Gursky’s photographs capture built and natural environments on a grand scale. Often taken from a lofted vantage point, the artist latter splices together multiple images of the same scene. This dizzying repetition of elements creates a surreal monumentality, as seen in his 99 Cent (1999). “In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical,” he mused. “Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.” Born January 15, 1955 in Leipzig, East Germany, he studied alongside fellow student Thomas Ruff under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s. The Becher’s penchant for systematic documentation as a conceptual framework had a profound impact on Gursky’s photography.

Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer best known for her documentary images of 1960’s counterculture. Her work highlighted Vietnam War protesters and societal outcasts in order to underscore their importance to contemporary society. “I’d rather pull up things from another culture that are universal that we can all relate to,” she has said of her approach to photography. Mark is most commonly associated with her 1983 spread Streetwise, published in Life Magazine, and the 2015 series “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,” which both documented the lives of homeless youths over the course of 30 years. Born on March 20, 1940 in Philadelphia, PA, she earned a BA in painting and art history and an MA in photojournalism from the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving her degrees, the artist moved to New York, where she created photo-essays for major publications, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair.

Martin Parr is a contemporary British photographer. Best known as a chronicler of life in provincial England, his unconventional observation of human behaviors serves as a mirror to reflect society’s values. Exploring themes of consumerism, globalization, and social stratification, Parr’s humorous yet visually seductive take on life is exemplified in his photobook The Last Resort (1986). “Unless it hurts, unless there's some vulnerability there, I don't think you're going to get good photographs,” he has said. Born on May 23, 1952 in Epsom, United Kingdom, he studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970 until 1973. Parr switched from black-and-white to color photography in 1984, joining peers such as Paul Graham. He went on to produce a number of series including Life’s a Beach (1986), and became a member of the revered collective Magnum Photos in 1988. Along with his numerous photobooks, the artist has also pursued filmmaking and fashion editorial work. He currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

Weegee was an Austrian-born American street photographer known for his often gruesome black-and-white images documenting murder and turmoil of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. He gained a reputation for having an almost mystical sense of when and where illegal acts would occur—aided by his portable police-band shortwave radio—and was often the first photographer at crime scenes. “To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real,” he once said. Born Arthur Fellig on June 12, 1899 in Zloczów, Austria-Hungary, the artist acquired his pseudonym from the phonetic spelling of Ouija, a fortune-telling game. He arrived in United States in 1940 and worked his way up from darkroom technician to photojournalist, eventually attracting the attention of the legendary museum director Edward Steichen. Weegee published his first book, Naked City, in 1945, a collection of his urban photography that would go on to influence countless artists, notably including Diane Arbus. Having achieved success in both the realms of popular media and fine art photography, Weegee died on December 26, 1968 in New York, NY at the age of 69.

Edward Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American artist and gallerist who was a key figure in the development of photography. Steichen notably served as The Museum of Modern Art’s director of photography from 1945 until 1962. In his own photographs, such as The Flatiron (1904), the artist experimented with coloring techniques developed by the French Lumière Brothers. “Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult,” he once explained. Born Éduard Jean Steichen on March 27, 1879 in Bivange, Luxembourg, his family immigrated to the United States in 1880. During the 1890s, Steichen worked as an apprentice lithographer, pursued painting, and began experimenting with photography. After becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1900, the young artist’s photographs gained the attention of Alfred Stieglitz that same year. He went on to co-found the journal Camera Work with Stieglitz, and became director of the U.S. Naval Photographic Institute during World War II. During his tenure at The Museum of Modern Art, he mounted the renowned exhibition “The Family of Man,” which consisted of over 500 photos from 68 countries. Steichen died on March 25, 1973 in Redding, CT.

Lee Friedlander is a seminal American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. “I’m not a premeditative photographer,” he has said. “You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.” Born on July 14, 1934 in Aberdeen, WA, he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before moving to New York in 1956. Influenced by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, he attempted to see things as if a step removed, spontaneously reacting to all the potential images in front of him.

Rineke Dijkstra is a contemporary Dutch photographer. Known for her single portraits, usually working in series, she often focuses on particular groups and communities of people, such as mothers, adolescent and teenage boys and girls, soldiers, etc., with an emphasis on capturing the vulnerable side of her subjects. “With young people everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed. “When you get older you know how to hide things.” Born on June 2, 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands, she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Dijkstra’s seminal series, Beach Portraits (1992–1994), is composed of life-sized color photographs of young teenagers in bathing suits taken on both American and European beaches. The project was shown in 1997 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in New Photography 13, bringing the artist widespread attention and critical acclaim

Ellen von Unwerth is a German photographer best known for her playfully erotic images of female pop musicians and models. Over the course of her career, the artist has photographed Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Adriana Lima, and Rihanna, among many others. “Technique undoubtedly helps make photography magical, but I prefer to work with atmosphere,” she has said. “I think that the obsession with technique is a male thing. I would rather search for a new model or location.” Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1954, she was raised in various foster homes in Bavaria. Discovered by a model-scout in Munich at 20 years old, she relocated to Paris, where she earned a living as a model for the next 10 years before turning to photography. In 1989, she shot Claudia Schiffer for a Guess fashion campaign, a commission which effectively launched her career. Since then, von Unwerth’s images have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and other publications, she has also shot campaigns for brands such as Dior, John Galliano, Ralph Lauren, and Uniqlo. In 1991, the artist won first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography, and American Photo Magazine named her as one of the most important people in photography in 1998. In 2017, the artist was the subject of the exhibition “Ellen von Unwerth Heimat,” at TASCHEN Gallery in Los Angeles, coinciding with a book launch of the same name. She currently lives and works in Paris, France.

Jeff Wall’s work synthesizes the essentials of photography with elements from other art forms—including painting, cinema, and literature—in a complex mode that he calls “cinematography.” His pictures range from classical reportage to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at the larger scale traditionally identified with painting.

Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he still lives. He became involved with photography in the 1960s—the heyday of Conceptual art—and by the mid-1970s he had extended Conceptualism’s spirit of experimentation into his new version of pictorial photography. His pictures were made as backlit color transparencies, a medium identified at the time with publicity rather than photographic art

Wolfgang Tillmans is an influential contemporary German artist. Emerging in the 1990s with his snapshot documentations of youths, clubs, and LGBTQ culture, Tillman’s practice has expanded to include diaristic photography, large-scale abstraction, and commissioned magazine work. “I want the pictures to be working in both directions,” the artist has said. “I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.” Capturing landscapes from an airplane window, still lifes of crustaceans, and portraits, his work conveys the profundity of an exhaustive archive. Born on August 16, 1968 in Remscheid, West Germany, Tillmans spent the early part of his career in London after graduating from the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design.

Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer whose intimate portraits and floral still lifes are characterized by their evocative light and attention to detail. “One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter,” she said of portrait photography. Born on April 12, 1883 in Portland, OR, she moved to Seattle with her family at a young age. At 18, Cunningham began experimenting with photography after purchasing a 4x5 inch view camera from a mail order catalogue. In 1907, after receiving a degree in chemistry from the University of Washington, she traveled to Dresden to study fine art at the Technische Hochschule. After studying in Europe, the artist moved to San Francisco where she worked alongside Maynard Dixon, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston. It was in the presence of these artists that Cunningham explored new photographic methods, including double exposure and montage printing. Cunningham was an influential member of the renowned f/64 group alongside Ansel Adams and Willard van Dyke. She would go on to have solo exhibitions at the Dallas Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist died in San Francisco, CA on June 23, 1976 at the age of 9

Dorothea Lange was a seminal American documentary photographer. Best known for her Depression-era pictures, she compassionately captured the squalid conditions of the people most effected by poverty and displacement. Born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, NJ, Lange survived polio during childhood that left her with a permanent limp in her right leg, an event which she cited as shaping her worldview and career. She went on to study photography at Columbia University in New York, eventually settling in San Francisco. Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the effects of the Depression on sharecroppers and other farm workers, and her indelible images—such as the instantly iconic Migrant Mother (1936)—shaped both public perception and government policy. Lange was also integral in helping Edward Steichen recruit photographers for his landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” at The Museum of Modern Art. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others. Lange died on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco, CA.