Bill Brandt (3 May 1904 – 20 December 1983) was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, son of a British father and German mother, Brandt grew up during World War I. Shortly after the war, he contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland.

He traveled to Vienna to undertake a course of treatment for TB by psychoanalysis. He was in any case pronounced cured and was taken under the wing of socialite Eugenie Schwarzwald. When Ezra Pound visited the Schwarzwald residence, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound allegedly offered Brandt an introduction to Man Ray, in whose Paris studio, Brandt would assist in 1930. Read full wikipedia article.

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Imogen Cunningham (April 12, 1883 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry.

She opened her own studio and won acclaim for portraiture and pictorial work. Most of her studio work of this time consisted of sitters in their own homes, in her living room, or in the woods surrounding Cunningham’s cottage. She became a sought after photographer and exhibited at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913.

In 1914 Cunningham’s portraits were shown at “An International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography” in New York and a portfolio of her work was published in Wilson’s Photographic Magazine.

In 1932, with this unsentimental, straightforward approach in mind, Cunningham became one of the co-founders of the Group f/64, which aimed to “define photography as an art form by a simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods”. Read full wikipedia article.

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Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set, and in 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie’s Art House auction.

In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander’s first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski’s 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship. Read full wikipedia article.

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Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was an American photographer, and co-founder of Group f/64. Most of his work was done using an 8 by 10 inch view camera.

In 1922, Weston experienced a transition from pictorialism to straight photography, becoming “the pioneer of precise and sharp presentation”. His pictures included the human figure as well as items of nature, including seaside wildlife, plants, and landscapes.

After 1927, Weston worked mainly with nudes, still life — his shells and vegetable studies were especially important — and landscape subjects. Read full wikipedia article.

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Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 – December 18, 2006) was an American photographer.

By the late-1920s, while living in Manhattan, Bernhard was heavily involved in the lesbian sub-culture of the artistic community, becoming friends with photographer Bernice Abbott and her lover, critic Elizabeth McCausland. She wrote about her “bisexual escapdes” in her memoir. In 1934 Bernhard began photographing women in the nude. It would be this art form for which she would eventually become best known.

Bernhard was hailed by Ansel Adams as “the greatest photographer of the nude”. Read full wikipedia article.

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Helmut Newton, born Helmut Neustädter (31 October 1920, Berlin, Germany – 23 January 2004, West Hollywood, California, USA) was a German-Australian fashion photographer noted for his nude studies of women. He died at the age of 83 on 23 January 2004 in Los Angeles in a car accident. Read wikipedia article.

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André Kertész (2 July 1894 – 28 September 1985), born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and by his efforts in establishing and developing the photo essay. Read full wikipedia article.

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