Blog

Philippe Halsman, the revealing leap

Latvian-born American photographer (1906-1979), 101 Life covers, inventor of jumpology.

Arnold Newman, the environmental portrait

American photographer (1918-2006), inventor of the portrait set in the subject's working environment.

James Van Der Zee, Harlem in pictures

American photographer (1886-1983), who documented the Harlem Renaissance for half a century.

Edward S. Curtis, the grand inventory

American photographer (1868-1952), thirty years photographing the Indigenous peoples of North America.

Eugène Atget, the Paris that was

French photographer (1857-1927), who photographed nearly 8,000 views of "old Paris" threatened by Haussmann.

Jacques Henri Lartigue, childhood in pictures

French photographer (1894-1986), who photographed his family's Belle Époque from age eight with an undimmed freshness.

Bill Brandt, shadow as material

German-born British photographer (1904-1983), portraitist, landscapist and explorer of the distorted nude.

Peter Lindbergh, the unretouched portrait

German photographer (1944-2019), who refused retouching and made black-and-white the signature of the supermodels.

Mary Ellen Mark, empathy without compromise

American photographer (1940-2015), who spent her career closest to the invisible: prostitutes, the homeless, the ill.

Eve Arnold, Magnum's first woman

American photographer (1912-2012), Magnum's first woman member, portraitist of Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X.

Larry Burrows, photographer of Vietnam

British photojournalist (1926-1971), nine years covering Vietnam for Life, killed on assignment in Laos.

Garry Winogrand, the avalanche of images

American photographer (1928-1984), New York street figure, who left 250,000 undeveloped negatives at his death.

Saul Leiter, colour ahead of its time

American photographer (1923-2013), forgotten pioneer of colour street photography, rediscovered in the 21st century.

Helmut Newton, eroticism assumed

German-Australian photographer (1920-2004), major fashion-photography figure, self-declared provocateur.

Irving Penn, the spare line

American photographer (1917-2009), master of fashion and stripped-down portraiture at Vogue.

Cecil Beaton, elegance and war

British photographer and set designer (1904-1980), royal portraitist and war reporter.

Weegee, the scanner of the New York night

Ukrainian-born American photographer (1899-1968), tabloid pioneer with a police-radio scanner in his car.

Tina Modotti, commitment and image

Italian photographer (1896-1942), Communist militant whose short photographic body of work shaped post-revolutionary Mexico.

Lewis Hine, photography in service of rights

American photographer (1874-1940), whose images of child labor helped pass the first U.S. child-labor laws.

Karl Blossfeldt, the living archive

German photographer and sculptor (1865-1932), inventor of a botanical photography of abstract beauty.

Vivian Maier, the invisible photographer

American photographer (1926-2009), a nanny by trade whose clandestine work was discovered only after her death.

Lee Miller, from Vogue to Dachau

American photographer (1907-1977), Vogue model, Man Ray's student and lover, war correspondent.

Gerda Taro, the forgotten photographer

German-Jewish photographer (1910-1937), the first woman photographer to die on the front, long eclipsed by Robert Capa.

Margaret Bourke-White, Life's first woman photographer

American photographer (1904-1971), Life's first staff photographer, the first American woman war correspondent.

László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus in pictures

Hungarian artist (1895-1946), Bauhaus teacher and theorist of a radically modern photography.

Willy Ronis, photography as tenderness

French photographer (1910-2009), with Ménilmontant and Belleville as his territory and humanism as his method.

Robert Doisneau, humanist humour

French photographer (1912-1994), figure of humanist photography and author of the Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville.

Brassaï, Paris by night

Hungarian-born French photographer (1899-1984), inventor of urban night photography.

Gordon Parks, the camera as weapon

American photographer and filmmaker (1912-2006), Life and Vogue's first Black staff photographer, civil rights activist with a camera.

W. Eugene Smith, photojournalism absolute

American photographer (1918-1978), a key Life figure who brought the photo-essay to its highest standard.

Paul Strand, the straight photograph

American photographer (1890-1976), the link between Stieglitz and modern documentary.

Alfred Stieglitz, photography as art

American photographer and gallerist (1864-1946), who established photography as a fine art in its own right.

Imogen Cunningham, seventy years of looking

American photographer (1883-1976), one of the first great professional photographers, active until age 93.

Edward Weston, the pure form

American photographer (1886-1958), who elevated everyday objects — a pepper, a shell — to pure abstraction.

Eadweard Muybridge, motion decomposed

British photographer (1830-1904), who proved horses gallop with all four hooves in the air, then invented chronophotography.

Julia Margaret Cameron, portraiture in the wet plate

British photographer (1815-1879), a pioneer of artistic portraiture in the 19th century, who took up photography at 48.

Man Ray, the experimenter

American artist (1890-1976), key figure of Dada and Surrealism, inventor of the rayograph.

Dorothea Lange, dignity in the crisis

American photographer (1895-1965), who showed a different America during the Great Depression.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment

French photographer (1908-2004), Magnum co-founder, who invented modern street photography with a Leica.

Richard Avedon, the portrait laid bare

American photographer (1923-2004), who raised fashion and author portraiture to an unmatched standard.

Berenice Abbott, chronicler of New York

American photographer (1898-1991) who saved Eugène Atget's archive and documented New York's 1930s transformation.

Ansel Adams, master of the landscape

American photographer (1902-1984), pioneer of the Zone System and bard of the American West.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans, born November 3, 1903 in Saint-Louis, United States and died April 10, 1975, in New Haven, Connecticut, was an American documentary photographer.

Robert Capa

August Sander

Photography at the Academy of Sciences

The inventors of photography