Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.

Rodchenko was one of the most versatile constructivist and productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again." https://www.moma.org/artists/4975

Alfred Stieglitz HonFRPS (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe. https://www.moma.org/artists/5664

Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 in Connecticut. She bought her first camera in the summer of 1968, when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and her early works are punctuated by images of the Bay Area landscape and photographs shot during drives the artist often took on the highways between San Francisco and Los Angeles. She switched majors from painting to photography, and while still a student, in 1970, she approached Rolling Stone magazine—just three years after its inception—with a few of her pictures. Some of them were published, thus beginning her career as a photojournalist and embarking on what would develop into a symbiotic relationship between the young photographer and a magazine famous for reflecting the American zeitgeist. Leibovitz’s first major assignment was for a cover story on John Lennon.

Leibovitz became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973, and by the time she left the magazine, she had amassed 142 covers and published photo essays on scores of stories, including the 1975 Rolling Stones tour. Moments of freedom and an unyielding imagination fed the evolution of Leibovitz’s photography. The monumental body of work taken during her thirteen-year tenure at Rolling Stone blurred the lines between celebrity and civilian, interviewer and interviewee, artist and subject, dissolving the boundary separating Leibovitz from those captured in her photographs. Documenting fellow reporters and photographers in addition to their subjects, Leibovitz highlighted those hidden behind the camera and brought them to the forefront. https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/24984-annie-leibovitz/

"At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.”

President James E. Carter
Presenting Ansel Adams with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom https://www.anseladams.com/

August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. His first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century".Sander's work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic https://www.moma.org/artists/5145

An English photographer of German birth, Bill Brandt traveled to Vienna in 1927 to see a lung specialist and then decided to stay and find work in a photography studio. There, in 1928, he met and made a successful portrait of the poet Ezra Pound, who subsequently introduced Brandt to the American-born, Paris-based photographer Man Ray. Brandt arrived in Paris to begin three months of study as an apprentice at the Man Ray Studio in 1929, at the height of the era’s enthusiasm for photographic exhibitions and publications; his work from this time shows the influence of André Kertész and Eugène Atget, as well as Man Ray and the Surrealists.

Upon his return to London, in 1931, Brandt was well versed in the language of photographic modernism. During the 1930s he published his important early monographs The English at Home (1932) and A Night in London (1932) in addition to becoming a frequent contributor to the illustrated press, specifically Picture Post, Lilliput, Weekly Illustrated, and Verve, his published pictures exemplifying his technical skill and his interest in building visual narratives. Some of his most significant reportages represented the extreme conditions created by World War II. After the war, Brandt began a long exploration of the female nude, transforming the body through the angle and frame of the camera lens. https://www.moma.org/artists/740

Born in Illinois, Bruce Davidson began taking pictures at the tender age of ten. As a teenager, he continued to develop his knowledge and passion for photography before being drafted into the US army and eventually stationed near Paris. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who would become a close friend and facilitate Davidson's induction into Magnum Photos. Approaching the lives of his subjects with sensitivity and respect, his photographs express a desire to observe, understand, and celebrate the complexity of individuals and their communities. https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/bruce-davidson-fine-prints/

Cornell Capa (originally Cornell Friedmann) was born in Budapest and moved to Paris in 1936 to join his brother, Robert, who had escaped from the increasingly anti-Semitic climate of Hungary in 1930. Although he had intended to study medicine, Cornell was drawn to photography through his brother and began making prints for him, as well as for Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chim (David Seymour). This experience encouraged him to become a professional photojournalist, and in 1937 he moved to New York to pursue a career. After he had worked in the darkrooms of the Pix agency and LIFE for a few years, his first photo story was published in Picture Post in 1939. During World War II, Capa worked for the US Army Air Corps Photo-Intelligence Unit and the Army Air Corps's public relations department. In 1946, he became a staff photographer at LIFE, based mainly in the American Midwest, and covered some three hundred assignments over the next three years. He was the magazine's resident photographer in England for two years, after which he returned to the United States, to produced some of his most well-known photo essays, on subjects such as Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign and the education of mentally retarded children. Upon Robert's death in 1954, Capa left LIFE to continue his borther's work at Magnum, the international cooperative photography agency co-founded in 1947 by Robert, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim (David Seymour), and George Rodger. Over the next twenty years, Capa photographed many important stories for Magnum, including the activities of the Perón government in Argentina; the Democratic National Conventions of 1956, 1960 and 1968; and John F. Kennedy's first hundred days in office.
Capa's photographic production slowed in the mid-1970s as he devoted himself more to the care and promotion of other photographers' work through his International Fund for Concerned Photography. In 1964, he organized the exhibition The Concerned Photographer, which led to the establishment of the International Center of Photography, an organization dedicated to the support of photography as a means of communication and creative expression, and to the preservation of photographic archives as a vital component of twentieth-century history. Capa received ICP's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Capa served as ICP's Director Emeritus until his death in 2008. https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/cornell-capa?all/all/all/all/0

David Seymour, CHIM, legendary photojournalist and co-founder of Magnum Photos, produced some of the most memorable photos of the 20th century. Born in Warsaw, Poland, he studied graphic arts in Leipzig, and then turned to photography in 1933 during the continuation of his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He covered many important political events for leading magazines including Life, beginning with the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of World War II he made his way to New York. During the war he served as a photo-interpreter with the U.S. Air Force in Europe. In 1947, CHIM co-founded Magnum, the international photojournalists’ cooperative, with his friends Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert. His postwar series of photographs of the physically and spiritually maimed “Children of Europe” attracted worldwide attention, was published in a book by UNESCO, and became part of the posthumous exhibit, “CHIM’s Children.” The sympathetic and compassionate portraits of these small victims of war led a friend to note that to CHIM, wars were an enormous crime against children. Fluent in several languages, with deep affinities for many countries and peoples, CHIM was truly international. Among his many photographic essays are outstanding portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Pablo Picasso. CHIM was killed at Suez, while photographing for Newsweek, by an Egyptian machine-gunner in 1956, four days after the Armistice was signed. https://davidseymour.com/

Unlike most people, who “go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” the “freaks” that interested Diane Arbus “were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”Although this is how Arbus explained her attraction to carnival entertainers, we might imagine her using similar language to describe people of unusually large or small stature, nudists, those with developmental disabilities, drag performers, and many others who appear regularly in her portraits.

Arbus typically gave her subjects the opportunity to present themselves as they saw fit. Starting in 1962, she used medium-format cameras that were held at the waist—she looked down into the viewfinder so nothing came between her face and that of her subject. The intimacy of this kind of photographic encounter could inform the confidence and self-possession we see in figures like the poised Naked Man Being a Woman, New York City (1968) or Burlesque Comedienne in Her Dressing Room, Atlantic City, New Jersey (1963). On other occasions, Arbus seems to reveal a precariousness hidden beneath the surface of life in the cultural mainstream. Her images of those who wield social power or simply appear to be secure, like the patriotic Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, New York City (1967), are often subtly disquieting.

Arbus’s interest in the experiences of people across the social spectrum may have emerged from her own childhood. She grew up in a wealthy family, and felt shielded from the effects of the Great Depression. This experience of privilege was distressing: “it was like being a princess in some loathsome movie…and the kingdom was so humiliating.” Perhaps because Arbus believed that she had not been sufficiently tested by adversity, she sought it out in the world around her. This personal investment in her chosen subject matter, however, did not lead Arbus to editorialize or make judgements. She typically avoided cropping her photographs for emphasis, and instead printed the entire negative, a choice registered by irregular black borders surrounding the image. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture,” she said. “And more complicated.”

One of Arbus’s creative touchstones was August Sander, who produced hundreds of photographic portraits documenting the citizens—and the social structure—of Weimar Germany. Arbus drew on the visual language of Sander’s frank and carefully composed images, whose subjects forcefully inhabit their place in society. Sander often highlighted some sign of the sitter’s vocation, like a bricklayer’s materials or a potter’s wheel, suggesting that identity is a social fact that can be made clear by an individual’s self-presentation. Arbus’s photographs seem more ambiguous, and are extraordinarily sensitive to what she called “the gap between intention and effect”: the distinction between what we try to communicate about ourselves and what is perceived by others.

Although Arbus was skeptical of popular praise and felt ambivalent about displaying her work, she came to occupy a central position in the art world of the late 1960s. This was partly thanks to the support of John Szarkowski, then the director of MoMA’s Department of Photography, who featured her alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents. Szarkowski’s description of the show’s contents could serve as an account of Arbus’s project in particular: “a new generation of photographers has redirected the documentary approach toward more personal ends…. Their work betrays a sympathy—almost an affection—for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value.”

In 1971, Arbus took her own life. Her photographs, however, continue to exert a powerful influence. For decades, artists like Nan Goldin, Judith Joy Ross, and Deana Lawson have been nourished by Arbus’s restless attraction to the unfamiliar and her refusal to offer judgement or easy answers. As Arbus herself famously put it, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” https://www.moma.org/artists/208

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London’s East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes.

Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler’s bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.

In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE. https://donmccullin.com/don-mccullin/

In early March, 1936, Dorothea Lange drove past a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” in Nipomo, California. At the time, she was working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration (RA), a Depression-era government agency formed to raise public awareness of and provide aid to struggling farmers. Twenty miles down the road, Lange reconsidered and turned back to the camp, where she encountered a mother and her children. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” she later recalled. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children killed.” 1 Lange took seven exposures of the woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, with various combinations of her seven children. One of these exposures, with its tight focus on Thompson’s face, transformed her into a Madonna-like figure and became an icon of the Great Depression and one of the most famous photographs in history. This image was first exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1940, under the title Pea Picker Family, California; by 1966, when the Museum held a retrospective of Lange’s work, it had acquired its current title, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.

Lange had little interest in classifying her photographs as art: she made them to effect social change. Although she had led a successful career as a portrait photographer in San Francisco throughout the 1920s, by 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, she began to photograph life outside her studio. On one early excursion, Graflex camera in tow, she visited a nearby breadline, which a woman known as the “White Angel” had set up to feed the legions of unemployed. This resulted in White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, a photograph of a man turned away from the hungry crowd, his interlaced hands and set jaw often taken as representative of a collective despair. Lange became increasingly confident in her ability to use photography to confront the urgent circumstances around her, and others—including her future husband, the agricultural economist Paul Taylor—soon recognized her talent.

In early 1935, on Taylor’s recommendation, Lange began to work for the California State Emergency Relief Administration. That summer, the agency was transferred to the RA, which had recently begun a photodocumentary project to draw attention to the plight of the rural poor. (In 1937, the RA would become the Farm Security Administration, or FSA.) Lange worked for the FSA periodically between 1935 and 1939, primarily traveling around California, the Southwest, and the South to document the hardships of migrant farmers who had been driven west by the twin devastations of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. On March 10, 1936, two of Lange’s photographs of the Nipomo pea pickers’ camp were published in The San Francisco News under the headline “Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squallor [sic].” The photograph that became known as Migrant Mother was published in the paper the following day, on March 11, accompanying the editorial “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean To This Mother and Her Children?” The same day, the Los Angeles Times reported that the State Relief Administration would deliver food rations to 2,000 itinerant fruit pickers in Nipomo the next day.

Lange’s commitment to social justice and her faith in the power of photography remained constant throughout her life. In 1942, with the United States recently entered into World War II, the government’s War Relocation Authority assigned her to document the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, a policy she strongly opposed. She made critical images, which the government suppressed for the duration of the war. Later, Lange accompanied Taylor to Asia, where she continued to take photographs, including ones of the legs, feet, and hands of dancers in Indonesia; she also traveled to Ireland for LIFE magazine.

In an essay written with her son in 1952, Lange critiqued contemporary photography as being “in a state of flight,” seduced by the “spectacular,” “frenzied,” and “unique” at the expense of the “familiar” and “intimate.” It had become, she wrote, “more concerned with illusion than reality. It does not reflect but contrives. It lives in a world of its own.” 2 Against this trend, she urged photographers to reconnect with the world—a call reflective of her own ethos and working method, which coupled an attention to aesthetics with a central concern for the documentary. “That the familiar world is often unsatisfactory cannot be denied, but it is not, for all that, one that we need abandon,” she argued. “We need not be seduced into evasion of it any more than we need be appalled by it into silence.… Bad as it is, the world is potentially full of good photographs. But to be good, photographs have to be full of the world.” 3 https://www.moma.org/artists/3373

Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.

Steichen was credited with transforming photography into an art form. His photographs appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking magazine Camera Work more often than anyone else during its publication run from 1903 to 1917. Stieglitz hailed him as "the greatest photographer that ever lived".

As a pioneer of fashion photography, Steichen's gown images for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 were the first modern fashion photographs to be published. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, while also working for many advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson. During these years, Steichen was regarded as the most popular and highest-paid photographer in the world. https://www.moma.org/artists/5623

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers", and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still-lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.

Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images. https://www.edward-weston.com/

Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, then emigrated to the US, via France, with his family in 1939. As a teenager living in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography and worked in a commercial darkroom before experimenting with photography at Los Angeles City College. In 1948, he moved to New York and exchanged janitorial work for film classes at the New School for Social Research.
Erwitt traveled in France and Italy in 1949 with his trusty Rolleiflex camera. In 1951, he was drafted for military service and undertook various photographic duties while serving in a unit of the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France.
While in New York, Erwitt met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, the former head of the Farm Security Administration. Stryker initially hired Erwitt to work for the Standard Oil Company, where he was building up a photographic library for the company, and subsequently commissioned him to undertake a project documenting the city of Pittsburgh.
In 1953, Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and worked as a freelance photographer for Collier’s, Look, LIFE, Holiday and other luminaries in that golden period for illustrated magazines.
In the late 1960s, Erwitt served as Magnum’s president for three years. He then turned to film: in the 1970s, he produced several notable documentaries and in the 1980s eighteen comedy films for HBO. Erwitt became known for benevolent irony, and for a humanistic sensibility traditional to the spirit of Magnum. https://www.elliotterwitt.com/

Eve Arnold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fifth of nine children of immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, William Cohen (born Velvel Sklarski), a rabbi, and his wife, Bessie (Bosya Laschiner). Both of Arnold's parents were grudgingly accepting of her choice to abandon medicine to study photography. She married Arnold Schmitz (later Arnold Arnold) in 1941. Her interest in photography began in 1946 while working for Kodak in their Fair Lawn, New Jersey photo-finishing plant. Using a gifted Rolleicord, she began to photograph her city with a fresh humanitarian perspective. Over six weeks in 1948, she learned photographic skills from Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Studying photography under Brodovitch, she produced a collection of photos from Harlem's vivid fashion show scene. The collection was published the series in the London Illustrated Picture Post in 1951. Although the series launched her career, she later wrote in a diary entry that the editor of the magazine changed her captions and reversed the message of her photographs to fit a racist narrative. She then became interested in African American migrant workers suffering housing discrimination in Long Island. She became the first woman to join the Magnum Agency, becoming a full member in 1957. Arnold spent time covering republican press events, the McCarthy hearings, and explored the taboo subject of birth. She was well aware of the underrepresentation of women photojournalists and the position of women celebrities in the public eye. Arnold explored these ideas about women in her full length photo book The Unretouched Woman, published in 1976. https://www.evearnold.com/

George Hoyningen-Huene (1900–1968) is acknowledged as an iconic pioneer in the genre of fashion photography. His elegant pared-down style has had a dramatic impact on photographers around the world and his work continues to have relevance today, as an artist who created some of the most striking photographic portraits and compositions of the twentieth century. https://www.georgehoyningenhuene.org/

"For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a “meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

To take a photograph means to recognize, simultaneously and within a fraction of a second‚ both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.

It is putting one‚ head, one‚ eye, and one‚ heart on the same axis." https://www.henricartierbresson.org/en/

The International Center of Photography is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Cornell Capa founded ICP in 1974 to champion “concerned photography” https://www.icp.org

Irving Penn was one of the twentieth century's great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking. Although he was celebrated as one of Vogue magazine's top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn was an intensely private man who avoided the limelight and pursued his work with quiet and relentless dedication. At a time when photography was primarily understood as a means of communication, he approached it with an artist's eye and expanded the creative potential of the medium, both in his professional and personal work. https://irvingpenn.org/

Karl Blossfeldt is best known for his precise photographs of plants; however, he began his career as a sculptor, completing apprenticeships at the ironworks and foundry in Mägdesprung and the Kunstgewerbeschule (Institute of the royal arts museum) in Berlin from 1884 to 1890. From 1890 to 1896 he traveled through Italy, Greece, and North Africa, working for Moritz Meurer, who theorized that natural forms were reproduced in art. From 1898 to 1930 Blossfeldt taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin; during this time, he amassed an archive of thousands of photographs of plants that he used as models to teach his students.

Never formally trained in photography, Blossfeldt made many of his photographs with a camera that he altered to photograph plant surfaces with unprecedented magnification. His pictures achieved notoriety among the artistic avant-garde with the support of gallerist Karl Nierendorf, who mounted a solo show of the pictures paired with African sculptures at his gallery in 1926 and, subsequently, produced the first edition of Blossdeldt’s monograph Urformen der Kunst (Art forms in nature), in 1928. Following the enormous success of the book, Blossfeldt published a second volume of his plant pictures, titled Wundergarten der Natur (The magic garden of nature), in 1932. The clarity, precision, and apparent lack of mediation of his pictures, along with their presentation as analogues for essential forms in art and architecture, won him acclaim from the champions of New Vision photography. His work was a central feature of important exhibitions, including Fotografie der Gegenwart and Film und Foto, both in 1929. https://www.moma.org/artists/24413

The LIFE Picture Collection is the visual chronicle of the 20th century and one of the most important photographic archives in the United States. From 1936 to 2000, LIFE commissioned more than 10 million photographs across 120,000 stories. At its height, LIFE magazine’s incomparable images and essays reached 1 of 3 American readers. The original prints, negatives, and associated manuscripts remain in Dotdash Meredith’s LIFE Picture Collection, an unprecedented cultural asset with millions of untold stories and unseen images. https://www.life.com/

Magnum Photos reaches a global audience and has established itself as the authentic, visual storytelling brand. Founded in 1947, it remains loyal to its original values of uncompromising excellence, truth, respect and independence.

With a continued commitment to documenting Cause and Purpose, the Magnum Photos collective provides a powerful narrative and vision of the world, that often defies convention, challenges the status quo and shapes the visual and cultural discourse. https://www.magnumphotos.com/

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself. https://www.moma.org/artists/3716

Margaret Bourke-White was a pioneering photojournalist whose insightful pictures of 1930s Russia, German industry, and the impact of the Depression and drought in the American midwest established her reputation. She took some of the first photographs inside German concentration camps at Erla and Buchenwald following the end of World War II and captured the last pictures of Mahatma Gandhi, in India.

Bourke-White entered Columbia University in 1921 to study herpetology; however, the following year a photography course taught by Clarence H. White at the Clarence H. White School of Photography left a lasting impression. For the course Bourke-White received her first camera, a secondhand 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ inch ICA Reflex with a cracked lens, taking her first photographs on glass plates. Though she continued to study zoology at the University of Michigan, from then on she never left the darkroom. In 1927 she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in biology, but she spent most of her time establishing herself as a professional photographer. Bourke-White opened her first studio in her apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. With photographs of architecture and industry, she earned commissions and caught the eye of Henry Luce, founder of Time and Fortune magazines, who, in 1929, invited her to become Fortune’s first staff photographer. She returned to New York and, in 1930, established a photographic studio in the Chrysler Building. When Luce launched Life magazine in 1936, Bourke-White joined the staff, and her picture Fort Peck Dam, Montana appeared on the first cover. https://www.moma.org/artists/712

Philippe Halsman was born in Riga and began to take photographs in Paris in the 1930s. He opened a portrait studio in Montparnasse in 1934, where he photographed André Gide, Marc Chagall, André Malraux, Le Corbusier and other writers and artists, using an innovative twin-lens reflex camera that he had designed himself.

He arrived in the United States in 1940, just after the fall of France, having obtained an emergency visa through the intervention of Albert Einstein.

In the course of his prolific career in America, Halsman produced reportage and covers for most major American magazines, including a staggering 101 covers for Life magazine. His assignments brought him face-to-face with many of the century’s leading personalities.

In 1945, he was elected the first president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, where he led the fight for photographers’ creative and professional rights. His work soon won international recognition, and in 1951, he was invited by the founders of Magnum Photos to join the organization as a ‘contributing member’, so that they could syndicate his work outside the United States. This arrangement still stands.

Halsman began a thirty-seven-year collaboration with Salvador Dalí in 1941 which resulted in a stream of unusual Photographs of Ideas, including Dalí Atomicus and the Dalí’s Mustache series.

In the early 1950s, Halsman began to ask his subjects to jump for his camera at the conclusion of each sitting. These uniquely witty and energetic images have become an important part of his photographic legacy. https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/philippe-halsman/

Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic figures in contemporary photography for more than five decades. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, McCurry studied cinematography at Pennsylvania State University, before going on to work for a newspaper. After two years, McCurry made his first of what would become many trips to India. Traveling with little more than a bag of clothes and film, he made his way across the subcontinent, exploring the country with his camera.

It was after several months of travel that he crossed the border into Pakistan. In a small village, he met a group of refugees from Afghanistan, who smuggled him across the border into their country, just as the Russian invasion was closing the country to Western journalists. Emerging in traditional dress, with a full beard and weather-worn features after months embedded with the Mujahideen, McCurry made his way over the Pakistan border with his film sewn into his clothes. https://www.stevemccurry.com/

Situated in the heart of Central London, at the gateway to Soho, The Photographers' Gallery (TPG) is the UK’s foremost centre for the presentation and exploration of photography in all its forms and home to an international community of photographers.

Open 7 days a week, TPG presents a diverse and critically acclaimed programme of exhibitions, events, talks, workshops and courses, as well as offering a unique, specialist bookshop, a dedicated space for the discovery and sale of photographic prints and a tranquil café. https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk

The Photographic Society, as The RPS was originally known, was not the first photographic society but it was the first to be formally organised to have been in continuous existence in the same form since its foundation. It took only a few years from the announcement of photography in 1839 for the first loose gathering of amateur photographers to come together.

The Edinburgh Calotype Club consisted of 'keen experimentalists' and was formed in 1843. Its dozen members met to look at calotypes, to discuss photographic art and to socialise. With such a small number of members, it had no need for rules or officers to run it. In London, the publisher Joseph Cundall, along with Robert Hunt, started the Calotype Society – later known as the Photographic Club - in 1847. This, again, was a gathering of around a dozen photographers or 'gentlemen amateurs' who met regularly to discuss their experiments in photography and to exchange photographs. Among its members were Frederick Scott Archer, Hugh Welch Diamond, Edward Kater and Sir William Newton who would later become founder members of the Photographic Society.

In mid-1852 the United Kingdom's first properly organised photographic society was formed in Leeds by J W Ramsden, who later become a Society member. The Leeds Photographic Society operated under properly constituted rules and as early as July 1852 it circulated the work of its members. In 1878 it became a section of the Leeds Field Naturalist Club and was re-established as an independent society in 1881. https://rps.org/

The V&A began acquiring photographs in 1852, and its collection is now one of the largest and most important in the world.

The history of the photography collection in the V&A is closely connected with the development of the Museum as a whole. Its first director, Henry Cole, was an amateur photographer himself and a great supporter of the art of photography. He began a photography collection in 1856, the year that the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, was established. Since then, the collection has grown to be international in scope and comprises over 800,000 photographs dating from 1839 to the present. Photography can be seen as a combination of science and art, in which advances in technique continually feed creativity and artistic achievement. https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photographs

Yousuf Karsh, CC RCA FRPS (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was a Canadian photographer known for his portraits of notable individuals. He has been described as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century.

An Armenian genocide survivor, Karsh migrated to Canada as a refugee. By the 1930s he established himself as a significant photographer in Ottawa, where he lived most of his adult life, though he traveled extensively for work. His iconic 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill was a breakthrough point in his 60-year career, through which he took numerous photos of known political leaders, men and women of arts and sciences. Over 20 photos by Karsh appeared on the cover of Life magazine, until he retired in 1993. https://karsh.org/