Edward Steichen
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
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
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.
August Sander
August Sander (born 1876, died 1964) was a German portrait photographer. His lifelong project People of the 20th Century shows German society through hundreds of calm, direct portraits of farmers, workers, artists and outsiders.
Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget (1857–1927) was a French photographer who spent about thirty years photographing old Paris with a large wooden camera. His quiet pictures of streets, courtyards and shop windows were sold as “documents for artists” and later shaped documentary photography.
Tod Papageorge
Tod Papageorge (born 1940) is an American street photographer and teacher. Close to Garry Winogrand in 1960s New York, he is best known for Passing Through Eden, his pictures of Central Park, and led Yale's graduate photography program from 1979 to 2013.
Michael Kenna
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
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
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
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.
Larry Fink
Larry Fink (born 1941, died 2023) was an American photographer of people at parties, balls, boxing gyms and fashion shows. His series Social Graces set New York society next to a working family in rural Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Norris Webb
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
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.
Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama (born 1938) is a Japanese street photographer. His grainy, blurred black and white pictures of Tokyo, made with a small camera, made him one of the best known photographers of postwar Japan.
Robert Adams
Robert Adams (born 1937) is an American photographer of the American West. His quiet black and white pictures of new suburbs, plains and forests helped define the New Topographics.
Justin Mott
Justin Mott is a documentary, editorial and commercial photographer based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His ongoing project Kindred Guardians follows people who dedicate their lives to animals.
JM Simpson
JM Simpson is a documentary photographer who lives in Lacey, Washington. He photographs people living without housing in Tacoma, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco.