Photo Photography

Category: Master Photographers

  • Annie Leibovitz

    Annie Leibovitz

    Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. While studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, she took night classes in photography, and in 1970, she began doing work for Rolling Stone magazine. She became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973. By the time she left the magazine, ten years later, she had shot 142 covers. In 1983, she joined the staff at Vanity Fair, and in 1998, she also began working for Vogue. She has worked with many arts organizations, including American Ballet Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Mark Morris Dance Group, and with Mikhail Baryshnikov. She is one of the worlds most influential portrait photographers.

    Her books include Annie Leibovitz: Photographs (1983), Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970–1990 (1991), Olympic Portraits (1996), Women (1999), American Music (2003), A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005 (2006), and Annie Leibovitz at Work (2008).

  • Bill Brandt

    Bill Brandt

    Bill Brandt, born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, (2 May 1904 – 20 December 1983) was a German-British photographer and photojournalist. Although born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his high-contrast images of British society, his distorted nudes and landscapes, and is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.

  • Edward Weston

    Edward Weston

    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 forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still life, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a “quintessentially American, and specially 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 x 10 inch view camera.

  • Ansel Adams

    Ansel Adams

    Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902– April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially of Yosemite National Park. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high-resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston. Adams’s photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.

  • Henri Cartier-Bresson

    Henri Cartier-Bresson

    Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908– August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the “street photography” or “life reportage” style that has influenced generations of photographers who followed. Throughout the 20th century, this roaming, lucid eye has captured the fascination of Africa in the 1920’s, crossed the tragic fortunes of Spanish republicans, accompanied the liberation of Paris, caught a weary Gandhi just hours before his assassination, and witnessed the victory of the communists in China.

  • Arnold Newman

    Arnold Newman

    Arnold Newman (1918 – 2006) was born in New York City. Generally acknowledged as the pioneer of the environmental portrait, he is also known for his still life and abstract photography, and he is considered as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th Century.