The Photographers
Eugene Atget (French, 1857-1927)
The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
In 1926 she opened her own portrait studio, and for the next three years photographed with honesty and grace the great and the famous of that Pari's intellectual world.
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
A landscape does not move in the conventional sense, but it changes constantly in other ways, most notably through the agency of light.
Ansel Adams attuned himself more precisely than any photographer before him to a visual understanding of the specific quality of the light that fell on a specific place at a specific moment.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
In a working life less than a decade Diane Arbus effected a profound reconsideration of photography's intensions. Her work turned away from the central concerns of the preceding generation.
E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949)
He was regarded by his acquaintances as no more than a competent commercial photographer. But Bellocq had also had a secret life. After his death a collection of about one hundred plates was discovered in a drawer of his desk.
Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983)
Brandt's work has been consistently separate from the photographic consensus of the moment: reflective when it should have been militant, romantic when it should have been skeptical, experimental and formal when it should have been factual.
BRASSAI (French, born Transylvania, 1899-1984)
In the early thirties he set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more disreputable levels.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Julia Margaret Cameron was a largely talented, highly intelligent, free-spirited, eccentric, financially comfortable English woman who took up photography as a personal adventure, as she might have taken up philanthropy or rose culture.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Henri Cartier-Bresson has described himself as a photojournalist, a label doubtless no more misleading than any other available.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990)
Ken Domon broke away from this romantic convention, and demonstrated that a clear depiction of the pertinent facts could be more challenging, and more surprising, than another mountain view in the mist.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
His work constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales.
Robert Frank (American, born Switzerland, 1924- )
The subject matter of Frank's pictures was not in itself shocking. Everyone knew about chromium and plastic luncheonettes, and tailfins and jukeboxes and motels and motorcycles and the rest of it. But no one had accepted without condescension these facts as the basis for a coherent iconography for our time.
Lee Friedlander (American, 1937- )
When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous.
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Much of Hine's work is not a protest but a celebration of people who had nerve, skill, muscle, and tenacity. There is in his pictures little pity and much love and respect for those who were casually called the common people.
Andre Kertesz (American, born Hungary, 1894-1985)
Perhaps more than any other photographer, Andre Kertesz discovered and demonstrated the special aesthetic of the small camera.
Josef Koudelka (Czech, 1939- )
Josef Koudelka has spent as much as possible of his life as a photographer making pictures of the Romani (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Dorothea Lange was marvelous with sunlight, and she was also marvelous with gesture.
Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Lartigue was a privileged child, and he made the best of it. From the subjects of his pictures one would assume that the life of his family was dedicated wholly to the pursuit of amusement.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
During the early 1940's Helen Levitt made many photographs on the streets of New York. Her photographs were not intended to tell a story or document a social thesis; she worked in poor neighborhoods because there were people there, and a street life that was richly sociable and visually interesting.
Eadweard Muybridge (American, born England, 1830-1904)
Muybridge's most important motion studies were published in 1887 as Animal Locomotion, a collection of 781 plates that described, in sequential frames, human beings and other creatures engaged in diverse characteristic activities.
Nadar was a writer, a caricaturist, a balloonist, a part-time political activist, a photographer, and a friend of the painters, writers, and intellectuals in Paris during the time of Napoleon III.
Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)
The best fashion photography has often indulged a similar taste for make-believe, and harmless (or almost harmless) mendacity. Irving Penn's simple little picture of a beautiful model in a fancy dress is a masterpiece of the genre.
It is perhaps appropriate to note here that there is no satisfactory and simple definition of the word photography that is not a tautology: e.g., photography is the process by which photographs are made.
Tatsuya Sato (Japanese, 1952- )
Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. Tatsuya Sato's artistic background is learning from the people, books & films, local galleries, and nature on the road.
W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
By the mid-forties it seemed to most talented young photographers that the future of the medium lay with the great new mass magazines.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Photography is a matter of eyes, intuition, and intellect. For eyes and intuition, no photographer was ever more richly endowed than Edward Weston.
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Consider Garry Winogrand's picture: so rich in fact and suggestion, and so justly resolved, more complex and more beautiful than the movie that Alfred Hitchcock might derive from it.