Famous Photographers

Produced portraits, still-life, and provocative homoerotic images, sparking posthumous controversy.

Created portable roll film and the Kodak camera, making photography accessible to the public.

Famous for detailed Yosemite photography and co-founded Group f/64, developing the Zone System.

Used self-portraits and staged photography to critique media stereotypes of women.

A German‑born American photojournalist whose candid, small‑camera images for Life magazine—including the iconic V‑J Day Times Square “kiss” photograph—helped define modern photojournalism.

Invented heliography and created the oldest surviving photograph of a real scene.

Known for large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs of modern life that sell for record prices.

Captured industrial, social, and wartime subjects, including Gandhi and WWII concentration camps.

Master of candid photography and founder of Magnum Photos, known for capturing the “decisive moment.”

Influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her empathetic, Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) that captured the human impact of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Most known for Migrant Mother

Improved the cinematograph and developed the first widely used color photography process, autochrome.

Created experimental “rayographs” and surrealist photography, rediscovering solarization techniques.

Developed his namesake type, a faster photographic process using iodized silver plates and mercury.

Used sequential photography to prove that racehorses lift all four feet off the ground and invented the zoopraxiscope.

Transitioned from pictorialism to fashion photography and directed MoMA’s photography department.

Pioneered high-speed photography using stroboscopic multiflash techniques.

Invented Polaroid instant film and the first commercially viable instant camera.

Documented the Civil War and established photojournalism in the United States.

Advanced photography as an art form and founded Camera Work and the Photo-Secession movement.