Fine art photography is a genre that focuses on the artistic expression of the photographer, rather than simply documenting reality or capturing moments. It encompasses a wide range of styles, subjects, and techniques, and often blurs the lines between photography and other visual arts.
Fine art photographers
Edward Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American photographer and curator. He moved from soft art prints to modern fashion and star portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and later made The Family of Man at MoMA.
Paul Strand (1890–1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker. His sharp New York pictures of 1916 helped make photography a modern art, and his later books gave quiet portraits of small communities in New England, Italy, the Hebrides and beyond.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American photographer and gallery owner who fought to make photography an art. His New York pictures, The Steerage, his portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and his cloud Equivalents are classics of modern photography.
Michael Kenna (born 1953) is a British photographer of quiet black and white landscapes, often made at dawn or at night with long exposures. Since 1987 he has photographed Japan again and again, from Tokyo to the snowy hills of Hokkaido.
Nan Goldin (born 1953) is an American photographer who has spent fifty years photographing her friends, lovers and chosen family. Her slideshow and book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is one of the most influential photographic diaries ever made.
Pete Turner was an American pioneer of color photography. His bold, saturated pictures, from Giraffe to more than a hundred jazz album covers, showed that color itself could be the subject.
Sherrie Nickol is an American fine art photographer based in New York City. Her book Chrysalis (Hirmer, 2026) gathers her earliest photographs from the late 1970s.
Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) is an American photographer and poet. Her quiet color books, like My Dakota and Night Calls, pair photographs with short texts about place, memory and loss.
Gregory Crewdson (born 1962) is an American photographer who makes staged, film-like pictures of small towns in western Massachusetts. He works with large crews and film lights, and teaches photography at the Yale School of Art.
Oviul Maruf is a Bangladeshi photographer based in Sylhet. In his series Botanical Silence, he photographs the flowers of his mother’s rooftop garden.
William Josephs Radford (b. 1998) is a photographer and artist raised in rural Andalucía, Spain. In Transparent, he removed his late father from family photographs.
Daesung Lee is a South Korean photographer based in Paris. In Nirvana he works with his mother, turning stories from her life into staged photographs.
Lauren Shaw is a photographer, documentary filmmaker, and educator. At the Rhode Island School of Design she earned her MFA in photography, studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.
Susan kae Grant is an American lens-based artist and educator, born in 1954. Her book Night Journey (MW Editions, 2026) turns more than twenty-five years of dream research into shadowy black-and-white photographs.
Jo Ann Chaus is an American artist based in the New York metropolitan area. Her book Unspoken (Kehrer Verlag, 2026) gathers more than ten years of staged self-portraits about identity and the expectations placed on women.
Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was an American photographer and teacher. He returned again and again to a few subjects close to him: his wife Eleanor, nature, buildings and people in the street.
Jan Groover (1943–2012) was an American photographer who started out as a painter. She is best known for her color still lifes of kitchen utensils from the late 1970s, which helped color photography win a place in museums.
Sam Haskins (1926–2009) was a South African-born British photographer. His 1960s books Five Girls and Cowboy Kate & Other Stories changed how photographers saw the nude and still influence fashion photography today.
Rinko Kawauchi (born 1972) is a Japanese photographer known for soft, bright color photographs of small everyday things. Her first three books came out on the same day in 2001.
Alec Soth (born 1969) is an American photographer from Minneapolis. On long road trips he photographs the people he meets, with a big view camera that makes everyone slow down.
Man Ray (1890–1976) was an American artist who spent most of his working life in Paris. He came to photography as a painter and became a key figure of Dada and Surrealism.
Sally Mann (born 1951) is an American photographer from Lexington, Virginia, where she still lives and works. She is best known for Immediate Family (1992), black-and-white pictures of her three children growing up.
Edward Weston (1886–1958) was an American photographer and one of the founders of Group f/64. He is known for sharp, simple pictures of peppers, shells, cabbages, nudes and the California coast.
Andreas Gursky (born 1955) is a German photographer who grew up in Düsseldorf. He is known for very large color photographs of architecture, landscapes and contemporary life, often taken from a high viewpoint.
Cindy Sherman (born 1954) is an American artist from New Jersey who works with photography. For about fifty years she has been the only model in her own pictures.