If you are looking to get inspired and motivated, then you’ve come to the right place. Because today we are happy to preset you the list of 21 famous photographers from different eras and genres.
If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.
Robert Capa
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Get Inspired By World Famous Photographers
If you love photography, narrowing down a list of famous photographers you should know and appreciate is a dense enough task when you aren’t looking to narrow that list down even further to a fixed number. Somehow, we managed and, based on criteria and objectiveness, we’ve listed 21 Famous Photographers who are known for their passion, dedication and style.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
1. Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
The “Supreme Master of Landscape Photography,” Ansel Adams’ prints are perfect evidence that what happens after you press the shutter button is extremely important.
Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, which is certainly no surprise since his images depict his pure fascination with nature. His landscape photographs of the American West—especially Yosemite National Park—are his most iconic body of work.
Anytime someone hears the phrase “landscape photography,” Adams is likely the first to come to mind. It’s no surprise because his passion for landscape photography transformed his skills into complete mastery.
Adams used mainly large format cameras, which are also known as view or field cameras. He used these cameras because of their ability to ensure extremely high resolutions and sharpness when rendering images. Large format cameras start at 4×5 inches.
To get an idea of the information large format cameras are capable of capturing, you can fit 15 35mm negatives in a 4×5 negative, which is the smallest of large format. Inside an 8×10 (another standard of large format), you can fit 60 35mm negatives.
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You can enjoy Adams’s work here but, if you’ve never had the chance of seeing his prints live, please do yourself a favor. You’ll be blown away by his impressive craft and will better understand his passion for producing the best tones in his images.
Ansel Adams On the Web:
2. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Co-founder of Mangum Photos alongside Robert Capa and David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the most respected street photographers in the field. Sometimes credited as the father of the street photography movement, he is also broadly known for coining the term “The Decisive Moment,” which states that if you’re able to see the moment, you likely won’t capture it and, instead, must learn to anticipate social happenings to best capture them.
The term invites photographers to develop an ability or intuition to press the shutter button moments before an event happens.
Henri Cartier-Bresson On the Web:
3. Philippe Halsman (1906-1979)
Philippe Halsman first contributed to fashion magazines between his departure from Austria and his arrival in France. He eventually stumbled into Vogue and, shortly after, built his reputation as the best portrait photographer in France.
Thanks to the Philippe Halsman Foundation, you can see his work here. His most notable muse was Salvador Dalí, which is evident thanks to creating out-of-this-world images like the famous Dali Atomicus.
Philippe Halsman On the Web:
4. Brassaï (1899-1984)
Born in Transylvania as Gyula Halász and better known as Brassaï, he was a Hungarian-French photographer who worked as a journalist throughout Europe. He was one of the many Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris between WWI and WWII.
Today, he is better known for his breathtaking night photography in France in the 1930s, a time where photographic resources were incredibly limited. His images are filled with subtle shapes only perceptible under the dim and dark night light, which is why his work is considered a great study of shape.
Thanks to the natural contrast enhanced by wet surfaces and limited available light, his compositions were reduced to the basic, most essential elements needed to transmit a concept.
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He captured the essence of Paris and many other cities in his photographs. One of the first of many collections of his work is a book titled Paris de Nuit, which was published in 1933 and was met with widespread success. The book itself is a beautiful work of art and was described by Henry Miller as “the eye of Paris” as Brassaï portrayed everything in the city including its high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and its grand operas.
Brassaï On the Web:
5. Man Ray (1890 -1976)
Born in the United States as Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was a visual artist who made significant contributions to both the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was best known for his innovative techniques as well as his stunning fashion and portrait photography. He created iconic photograms named “Rayographs” after himself.
Close friends with Alfred Stieglitz, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí, Ray went to live and work in Paris in July 1921. He settled in the Montparnasse quarter, which was a favorite locale for artists of the era. Shortly after settling in Paris, he met and fell in love with Alice Prin (better known as Kiki de Montparnasse), an artists’ model and celebrated character in Paris’ bohemian circles. She was his companion throughout the 1920s and became the subject of some of his most famous photographs.
One of Ray’s most iconic portraits of Kiki is known as Noire et Blanche (1926). In the image, we see a contrast of black and white as well as the inanimate and animate with both elongated faces and closed eyes.
Ray’s other iconic images include Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Larmes (1930), which is also known as Glass Tears. In Le Violon d’Ingres we see an homage to Ingres and his fascination for playing the violin for his guests. The image shows a nude and limbless Kiki depicting a violin with the f-holes as the most notable surrealist element of the portrait. Larmes is linked to his romantic rupture with Lee Miller and depicts an unrealistic character of sadness with crystal tears and perfect eyelashes.
Man Ray On the Web:
6. Weegee (1899-1968)
Born as Usher Fellig in Złoczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), he later changed his name to Arthur Fellig when, at 10 years old, he immigrated to the United States with his family. Later known as Weegee, he was a photojournalist best known for his harsh black and white street photography depicting crime scenes and emergencies.
He published photography books and worked in cinema, first making his own independent short films before collaborating with the famous Stanley Kubrick. After working as a darkroom assistant to commercial photographers, he took matters into his own hands and became a freelance news photographer.
Thanks to his strategy of hanging out at different police stations, Weegee was close to emergency calls and law enforcement fighting crime. When any incident came over the scanner, he raced the cops to the scene to capture people at their rawest state. This is why his images became highly valuable to the press.
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Weegee became so fast that he prided himself on arriving before the police in any situation, which caused many to assume he used a Quija board to know where and when things would happen. In fact, the phonetic pronunciation of this artifact became his nickname “Weegee,” which he loved.
Throughout his career, he used a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera and a mounted flash. He is not known for his printing ability but for the elements of his social photographs.
His work reached beyond the press as he crafted a career on his own terms. He implanted his brutal, humorous and absurd style into his work making him the only Weegee in photography history.
You can see an excerpt of his harsh, stark images here and here. You can purchase his book Weegee to see even more of his unique style.
Be sure to look for one of my favorites—a simple, yet strong cinematic shot of two men at the buck of a truck that’s under arrest.
Weegee On the Web:
7. Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015)
Mary Ellen Mark was known for her broad scope of photography extending from photojournalism and documentary photography to portraiture and advertising photography. Her images depict a unique sense of closeness and care for the people she photographed throughout her career.
Her images are simple, yet strong in a juxtaposition that is as hard to achieve as humor in street photography. Through her unique approach, she achieved narrative statements in a single aspect.
Although that was hard enough, she took things even further with her incredible and solid composition in her framings. But, guess what? She never cropped. She hated the idea of cropping after capturing an image so much that she cropped in the camera. Of course, cropping is necessary to improve a prior shot but, if you can crop perfectly in the viewfinder, then you’re definitely raising the bar.
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For Mary Ellen, she truly believed that the photographer must be emotionally involved with the images, otherwise, you would never get it right.
One of my all-time favorites of her photographs, called Rat and Mike with a gun, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1983. The image shows two youngsters with a very fierce attitude in the streets.
Mary Ellen Mark On the Web:
8.Robert Capa (1913-1954)
Born as Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, Robert Capa was a Hungarian war photographer who left a tremendous and important body of work—in anthropological terms—of who we are as a culture.
In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris with David “Chim” Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers and is still active today.
Although he originally dreamed of becoming a writer, Capa fell in love with photography in his early years. Prior to working as a photographer in Berlin in 1933, he moved to France during the rise of Nazism when his roots cost him valuable work. He and his beloved Gerda Taró created a persona of this great American photographer we know as Robert Capa.
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Capa reached fame in 1936 with his controversial image of the falling soldier at the Spanish Civil War. Although many things have been said about this incredible image, I want to and will believe that the image is legitimate.
By 1944, he was living in New York City due to the Jewish persecution of WWII. He was embedded with the American troops and photographed the war for LIFE magazine. On June 6th, he was part of the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, Normandy where he was inside the second wave of troops. It’s been said that he shot 106 images with his trusty Contax camera and 50mm lens.
Capa almost lost his life in the bloody event but, after finally reaching safety, he sent the images to LIFE headquarters in England where an incredibly hated character in the history of photography melted the emulsion and the negatives. Only 10 images survived with Mangum Contact Sheets posting that the negative of the iconic image of a soldier coming up the beach was missing.
After publicly stating he was done photographing war, Capa traveled to Japan for the Magnum Exhibition in the early 1950s. LIFE magazine talked him into going to Southeast Asia on an assignment covering the French fighting in the first Indochina war. On May 25, 1954, he stepped on a landmine while photographing the war. He died on the way to the local hospital.
Robert Capa On the Web:
9. Gerda Taró (1910-1937)
Born as Gerta Pohorylle, Taró was a war photographer and Endre Friedmann’s (Robert Capa) beloved companion and professional partner. She is regarded as the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines of war and, unfortunately, is also recognized as the first female to die while doing so.
She moved to Paris with Friedmann in 1935 to begin working as a team. Financially speaking, things weren’t as they expected so they came up with a groundbreaking idea—they created the myth around a famous American photographer named Robert Capa. Thanks to the importance of the journalistic task, Friedmann embraced the idea as the two worked as Capa’s “agent.” While some argue that this was a joint effort between the two, I prefer to believe it was all Taró’s brilliant idea.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Taró traveled to Barcelona, Spain to cover the events with Capa and David “Chim” Seymour. During this time, she was known by her nickname—La Pequeña Rubia.
With Taró using a Rolleiflex camera, this became the criteria that determined which images were credited to Capa that she actually shot. However, this is not precise criteria since the couple shared their gear. This is especially important for those questioning the legitimacy of The Death of the Soldier.
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Eventually gaining more professional independence from Friedmann/Capa, she covered many conflicts alone like the La Batalla de Guadalajara.
During her coverage of the Republican army retreat at the Battle of Brunete on July 25, 1937, she hopped onto the footboard of a car carrying wounded soldiers when a Republican tank crashed into its side. Taró was critically injured and died the following day.
Gerda Taro On the Web:
10. Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. In the 1930s, one of the deepest and harshest economic crises occurred in human history and led many people to migrate throughout the United States. This set the perfect stage for Lange to document life in America.
Thanks to an initiative set by President Roosevelt, the Farm Security Administration was established. Roy Stryker, a man with the organization, contacted many photographers to capture the realities that farmers faced at the time. One of those photographers was Lange whose work humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.
Although she gave us a tremendous body of work that is invaluable to human history, her most iconic image is Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1938).
Migrant Mother is an icon of the struggles the American people endured during the Great Depression. The woman captured is Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven. Lange uncovered her story after spending a few minutes with Thompson and her family.
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She took a series of photographs of Thompson and her children with the most famous image capturing Thompson in the center of the frame. While our eyes go directly to her expression, it’s only moments later when we notice she’s surrounded by three of her kids. The focal point of the image is her hands, which marked Lange’s fascination with hands and their embodiment of hard, rural work.
Dorothea Lange On the Web:
11. Sally Mann (1951-)
A talented American photographer, Sally Mann is largely known for her large format black and white photographs. She has covered the intimacy of her family and, although the work is amazing, it’s unfortunately created some controversies in the past especially with the piece titled Immediate Family.
Immediate Family is one of many of Mann’s books and depicts 65 images of her three children—Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia. The topics cover the broad scope of childhood themes from joyful to gloomy. She covered everything from skinny dipping and reading the funnies to dressing up, vamping, napping and playing board games. She also depicted insecurities, loneliness, injury, sexuality, and death.
Mann’s images are about the final product as she works with film and wet plate as well as handcrafted prints. Her artistic vision is complex at times, which is why I love her work so much.
Sally Mann On the Web:
12. Robert Frank (1924- )
Born in Zürich, Switzerland, Robert Frank is among the greatest American photographers. His most notable and respected book of work is The Americans (1958) with an introduction written by one of my favorite writers, Jack Kerouac. The book contains 84 images of 28,000 shots taken for the project. It is considered one of the few agents of change in photography history. The cover of the book is Trolley-New Orleans (1955) and depicts an everyday scene, which is also a subtle, social critique of the time.
Frank’s images are about capturing the unseen in everyday life that seemed to be obscured by other topics rising in popularity thanks to the after-war phenomena of the 1950s. Nowadays, it is common to see great street photography and documentary photography focusing on everyday life. However, Frank did this when the masses demanded something else, which is why he’s beloved by photographers today.
Robert Frank On the Web:
13. William Eggleston (1939- )
William Eggleston is an American photographer who is best known for his successful efforts to increase the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium, which has been widely known for its monochromatic images.
Eggleston’s images were presented in the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1976 and marked the groundbreaking scene of the Art of Photography. In 1967, he presented his Kodachrome prints to John Szarkowski who curated nearly 400 images into a selection of 75 photographs. These images portrayed the everyday scene. His work was critiqued by Hilton Kramer who defined them as “elegant snapshots.” Today, they’re known as a definitive corpus of color photography in the art world.
Some of my favorite images are those presented at the MoMA under “William Eggleston’s Guide.” You can see an excerpt of this collection here under the section “Monographs.”
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One of his most iconic images of the human-less tricycle is a great representation of solitude and speaks volumes about humanity. The tricycle is simple but its notoriously large presence speaks in a suggestive way and invites viewers to think. Personally, I think this image summarizes life from the great and simple joys of childhood to the less enjoyable stages of adulthood and beyond.
William Eggleston On the Web:
14. Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Irving Penn was an American photographer best known for his fashion photography, portraits and still-lifes. Some of his most notorious works were published in Vogue magazine but he also worked with independent clients. His work has been exhibited around the globe and continues to inform the art of photography.
He studied drawing, painting, graphics and industrial arts under Alexey Brodovitch from 1934 to 1938. As a student, he worked under Brodovitch’s supervision at Harper’s Bazaar. He eventually worked for Vogue magazine when Alexander Liberman offered him a position as an associate with the Art Department. After explaining his ideas for photographers, Liberman asked Penn why he didn’t take the images himself, which triggered a non-stop evolution that created the photographer we all know and love today.
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Penn was a pioneer and was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop with great effect. He went even further and started working with a corner to squeeze celebs into a pose.
Referring to just a few favorites seems pointless. I invite you to see what you can find of Penn’s work online, in magazines and at museums. You can see some of his Vogue work here. There are two books filled with portraits and still life that you won’t want to miss.
Irving Penn On the Web:
15. Vivian Maier (1926-2009)
There’s been a lot of complexity surrounding Vivian Maier since her work was discovered by John Maloof. Her work was incredibly intimate—she was a collector who collected moments with her camera. She worked as a nanny for much of her life and never approached the artistic industry by any means. You can read more about the history behind her discovery here.
There’s also a splendid documentary titled Finding Vivian Maier that was nominated for a 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature that better outlines her world vision and incredible talent.
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Her photographs are an entirely new level of amazing. Maloof has published so many images that it’s hard to imagine that one person is behind such a large body of magnificent images but, she deserves all the credit. For me, she is truly one of the masters.
16. Josef Koudelka (1938 – )
Josef Koudelka was born in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia. He started photographing his family and hometown before he earned his first commissions from theatre magazines, which is a slightly different niche from what he is best known for today.
First working as an aeronautical engineer in 1961 while documenting the gypsy culture in Czechoslovakia, he became a full-time photographer in 1961 and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1970. His most iconic photo which poetically portrays the drama surrounding the invasion of military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they seized Prague.
Due to widespread anti-Semitism, he signed his images with the initials P.P. (Prague Photographer).
Ted Forbes made a very interesting video of his work here, where he also reviewed this book, which I own and is a real jewel. Nowhere Films made a Documentary Film about Koudelka called “Shooting Holly Land”.
17. Elliott Erwitt (1928 – )
Humor is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve in any discipline but Elliott Erwitt makes it seem easy as a photographer known for his candid, humorous photographs of ironic and absurd situations in everyday life.
He also served in the United States Army during the 1950s and documented military situations with his own unique and peculiar style.
He joined Magnum Photos in 1953 and worked as a freelance photographer for numerous magazines. He also frequently works with a special subject—his dogs—and has published four books that all center on his elegantly unique Erwittian humor.
18.W. Eugene Smith (1918 – 1978)
W. Eugene Smith captured his first photographs in 1933 and later sold them to magazines. In 1936, he received a scholarship to study photography at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He then moved to New York where he studied under Helene Sandors at the Institute of Photography. From 1937 to 1938, he was a reporter for Newsweek and later worked as an independent photographer for the Black Star agency.
His most iconic works are “The Jazz Loft Project” and “Country Doctor”
He worked under contract for LIFE magazine from 1939 to 1942. During World War II, he was a war correspondent in the South Pacific where, despite a serious injury, he captured some of the most impressive images of his career.
19. Garry Winogrand (1928 – 1984)
Garry Winogrand was an amazing photographer who is often praised as “the central photographer of his generation.” He is, without a doubt, a master of contemporary photography.
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Winogrand was extremely prolific with the camera. By the time of his death in 1984, he had 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film and an upwards of 300,000 unedited images. While the previous generation of documentary photographers captured images to document social causes, Winogrand and his peers believed that everyday life had as much value as its subjects, which is why he is such an incredible photographer to study.
20. André Kertész (1894 – 1985)
André Kertész was only a teenager when he found a photography manual and decided to become a photographer. With his father’s sudden death, his plans were interrupted as he entered trade school and worked for the Budapest Stock Exchange. In 1913, he purchased his first camera and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army the following year. After leaving the army, he devoted his full attention to his passion for photography.
In 1927, he made his first exhibition where he met and befriended Brassaï. He loved the medium’s versatility and realized that there was no need to alter reality since it already offered a visible richness. That’s why his photographs are known to be surprising, playful and visually intricate.
You can see more of his work at the International Center of Photography.
