Here are five well-known photographs. Can you name the photographers who took them?
Under each picture, choose one of three names. If you get stuck, open the hint. After you choose, you will see the answer and a short story about the photograph.
Your score is waiting at the end.
HintThe photographer said it was dull to stand and look down at the subject, so he got down low with it.
Untitled (Memphis), 1970
William Eggleston (born 1939) is an American photographer from Memphis, Tennessee. His 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York helped make color photography accepted as art.
It was the cover image of William Eggleston's Guide (1976). The tricycle is seen from below, so it looks huge. Source: metmuseum.org
Did you know? The original Kodachrome transparency was lost at some point after the 1980 edition of 20 prints was made. Source: phillips.com
HintAround this time the photographer put aside her 35mm cameras for a twin-lens camera held at waist level, which helped her meet her subjects eye to eye.
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was an American photographer from New York. After ten years in fashion photography with her husband, she began her own work in 1956.
Arbus made it in Central Park in 1962. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls it an iconic image of the tension between childhood play and violence. Source: metmuseum.org
Did you know? On the contact sheet the boy smiles in other frames. She chose the odd one with the stiff body and clawed hands. Source: nationalgalleries.org
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Source: nmwa.org
HintHe came to see the creative power of photography through a friendship with an Abstract Expressionist painter.
Bus, New York, 1954
Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was an American photographer and painter. From the late 1940s he photographed the streets of New York in colour, close to his home, at a time when serious photographers worked in black and white.
Did you know? Some of his color work was shown at MoMA in 1953, but for about forty years afterward it stayed largely unknown to the art world. Source: gallery51.com
“I happen to believe in simple things and the beauty of simple things.” Source: wuwm.com
HintFor this picture the photographer used a Hasselblad on a tripod and tried several lenses.
Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1960
Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was an American landscape photographer and conservationist. His black-and-white pictures of Yosemite and the national parks are among the best known in photography.
Did you know? He was in the valley that December to direct the Bracebridge Dinner, a holiday event, when he made the picture on a cold, snowy afternoon. Source: theanseladamsgallery.blogspot.com
HintWhile making this body of work, the photographer was once held and questioned by state police for several hours, partly because he looked foreign and drove an old car.
Men's room, railway station, Memphis, Tennessee, 1955
Robert Frank (1924–2019) was a Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker who moved to New York in 1947. His book The Americans, made on a Guggenheim-funded road trip in 1955 and 1956, changed how photographers saw everyday life.
It is from Frank's series The Americans. A shoeshine stand sits next to a row of urinals in the Memphis railway station. Source: nga.gov
Did you know? He shot 767 rolls of film, about 27,000 images, and in the end chose only 83 for the book. Source: nhpr.org
