Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. Avedon capitalized on his early success in fashion photography and expanded into the realm of fine art.

In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action.

Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8×10 view camera. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. Avedon would at times evoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject’s character and personality that were not typically captured by others. Read full wikipedia article.

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Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton CBE, (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.

He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photographer for the French Vogue traveled to England with his new friend Horst. Horst himself would begin to work for French Vogue in November of that year. The exchange and cross pollination of ideas between this collegial circle of artists across the Channel and the Atlantic gave rise to the look of style and sophistication for which the 1930s are known.

Beaton is best known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood. Read full wikipedia article.

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Harry Morey Callahan (October 22, 1912 – March 15, 1999) was an American photographer who is considered one of the great innovators of modern American photography. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and started photographing in 1938 as an autodidact. By 1946, he was appointed by László Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Callahan retired in 1977, at which time he was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Callahan left almost no written records–no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day’s best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year. Read full wikipedia article.

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Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures. Cameron’s photographic career was short, spanning the last eleven years of her life. She did not take up photography until the age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Her work had a huge impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits which are still mimicked today. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight can still be visited.

In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.”

The basic techniques of soft-focus “fancy portraits”, which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that “to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success”.

Cameron’s sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House, which gave her many famous subjects for her portraits. Some of her famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject’s face and are in soft focus. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos. Among Cameron’s lesser-known images are those she took of Mary Emily (‘May’) Prinsep, wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, the elder son of Alfred Tennyson and a British colonial administrator. Cameron’s portraits of May Prinsep, taken on the Isle of Wight, show a somewhat plain woman shot head-on and without affect. Read full wikipedia article.

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Alvin Langdon Coburn (June 11, 1882 – November 23, 1966) was an early 20th century photographer who became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.

Coburn’s prints at the Royal Photographic Society attracted the attention of another important photographer, Frederick H. Evans . Evans was one of the founders of the Linked Ring, an association of artistic photographers which was considered at that time to be the highest authority for photographic aesthetics. In the summer of 1900 Coburn was invited to exhibit with them, which elevated him to the ranks of some of the most elite photographers of the day.

In 1901 Coburn lived in Paris for a few months so he could study with photographer Edward Steichen and Robert Demachy . He and his mother then toured France, Switzerland and Germany for the remainder of the year. Read full wikipedia article.

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Bruce Davidson (born September 5, 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois) is an American photographer. He has been a member of Magnum agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published in a number of books.

After his military service, in 1957, Bruce Davidson worked briefly as a freelance photographer, before joining Magnum the following year. During the following few years, he photographed extensively, most notably producing Brooklyn Gang and The Dwarf. From 1961 to 1965, Davidson produced one of his most famous bodies of work as he chronicled the events and effects of the Civil Rights Movement around the country, in both the North and the South. In support of his project, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, and his finished project was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Upon the completion of his documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, Davidson received the first ever photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Read full wikipedia article.

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Jack Delano (August 1, 1914 – August 12, 1997) was an American photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and a composer noted for his use of Puerto Rican folk material.

After graduating from the PAFA, Delano proposed a photographic project to the Federal Art Program: a study of mining conditions in the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania anthracite coal area. Delano sent sample pictures to Roy Stryker and applied for a job at the FSA. Through the help of Edwin Rosskam and Marion Post Wolcott, Stryker offered Delano a job at $2,300/year. As a condition of the job, Delano had to have his own car and driver’s license, both of which he acquired before moving to Washington, D.C.

Before working at the FSA, Delano had done his own processing and developing but he didn’t have to do either of that at the FSA. Other photographers working for the FSA include Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks. In 1943 FSA was eliminated as “budget waste” and subsumed into the Office of War Information (OWI). Read full wikipedia article.

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Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.

In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern states.

In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many are Called. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt.

Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture). Read full wikipedia article.

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George Hurrell (June 1, 1904 – May 17, 1992) was a photographer who made a significant contribution to the image of glamour presented by Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s.

In the late 1920s, Hurrell was introduced to the actor Ramon Novarro, by Pancho Barnes, and agreed to take a series of photographs of him. Novarro was impressed with the results and showed them to the actress Norma Shearer, who was attempting to mould her wholesome image into something more glamorous and sophisticated in an attempt to land the title role in the movie The Divorcee. She asked Hurrell to photograph her in poses more provocative than her fans had seen before. After she showed these photographs to her husband, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, Thalberg was so impressed that he signed Hurrell to a contract with MGM Studios, making him head of the portrait photography department Read full wikipedia article.

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Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009)[1][2] was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for “street photography” around New York City, and has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.”

Levitt grew up in Brooklyn. Dropping out of high school, she taught herself photography while working for a commercial photographer. While teaching some classes in art to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children’s street culture of the time.

In 1959 and 1960, Levitt received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take color photographs on the streets of New York, and she returned to still photography.

She lived in New York City and remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years. Read full wikipedia article.

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