Mathew B. Brady was one of the earliest photographers in American history. Best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, among other public figures.
George Washington Wilson was a pioneering Scottish photographer. In 1849, he began a career as a portrait miniaturist, switching to portrait photography in 1852. He received a contract to photograph the Royal Family, working for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He pioneered various techniques for outdoor photography and the mass production of photographic prints as he gradually began to largely do landscape photography in the 1860s. By 1864 he claimed to have sold over half a million prints.
Norman Parkinson, was an English portrait and fashion photographer. His work revolutionised British fashion photography, as he moved the craft out of the studio and into outdoor settings. He became an official royal photographer in 1969, taking photographs for Princess Anne's 19th birthday and the Investiture portrait of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. Many other royal portraits included official portraits of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother for her 75th birthday in 1975. He received many honours during his life including the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, a Google Doodle, and a British postage stamp.
John Jabez Edwin Paisley Mayall was an English photographer who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria. He is most well known for his 1875 portrait of Karl Marx.
Hugh Cecil Saunders was an English photographer of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, who practised under the professional name of Hugh Cecil.
Valentine Blanchard was a prominent English photographer who was widely recognized for his artistic and technical contributions to photography in the 1860s. Both his landscape and his portrait photography were highly valued by the public, commanding high prices and selling well. He was much appreciated by his peers for the technical innovations he pioneered in photographic processes.
Elliott & Fry was a Victorian photography studio founded in 1863 by Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry. For a century, the firm's core business was taking and publishing photographs of the Victorian public and social, artistic, scientific and political luminaries. In the 1880s, the company operated three studios and four large storage facilities for negatives, with a printing works at Barnet.
Emil Otto Hoppé was a German-born British portrait, travel, and topographic photographer active between 1907 and 1945. Born to a wealthy family in Munich, he moved to London in 1900 to train as a financier, but took up photography and rapidly achieved great success.
Olive Cotton was a pioneering Australian modernist photographer of the 1930s and 1940s working in Sydney. Cotton became a national "name" with a retrospective and touring exhibition 50 years later in 1985. A book of her life and work, published by the National Library of Australia, came out in 1995. Cotton captured her childhood friend Max Dupain from the sidelines at photoshoots, e.g. "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made several portraits of him. Dupain was Cotton's first husband.
Bourne & Shepherd was an Indian photographic studio and one of the oldest established photographic businesses in the world. Established in 1863, at its peak, it was the most successful commercial firm in 19th-and early 20th-century India, with agencies all over India, and outlets in London and Paris, and also ran a mail order service. A devastating fire in 1991 destroyed much of the studio's photographic archive and resulted in a severe financial loss to the firm. The long-term impact of the fire, legal difficulties with the Indian government, which owned the studio building, and the increasing dominance of digital technology, finally forced the studio's closure in June 2016. At its closure, the studio had operated continuously for 176 years.
Camille-Léon-Louis Silvy was a French photographer, primarily active in London.
Guglielmina 'Mina' Leonesi was an Italian opera singer and actress, active in the early 20th century.
Reynolds Mark Ellis was an Australian social and social documentary photographer. He also worked, at various stages of his life, as an advertising copywriter, seaman, lecturer, television presenter and founder of Brummels Gallery of Photography, Australia's first dedicated photography gallery, where he established both a photographic studio and an agency dedicated to his work, published 17 photographic books, and held numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas.
Walter Ernest Stoneman was an English portrait photographer who took many photographs for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London.
Carl Vandyk was a successful London photographer born in Bunde, Germany. From 1882 he owned a studio at Gloucester Road taking images of the British Royal Family including Queen Victoria, King George V as well as other notables such as Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Christian X of Denmark, Buffalo Bill and Enrico Caruso. From 1901 the studio moved to Buckingham Palace Road, London.
Henry James Johnstone (1835–1907) was a leading portrait photographer in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia during the 1870s and 1880s, and also a prominent artist.
Scotland played a major role in the technical development of photography in the nineteenth century through the efforts of figures including James Clerk Maxwell and David Brewster. Its artistic development was pioneered by Robert Adamson and artist David Octavius Hill, whose work is considered to be some of the first and finest artistic uses of photography. Thomas Roger was one of the first commercial photographers. Thomas Keith was one of the first architectural photographers. George Washington Wilson pioneered instant photography and landscape photography. Clementina Hawarden and Mary Jane Matherson were amongst the first female photographers. War photography was pioneered by James MacCosh, James Robertson, Alexander Graham and Mairi Chisholm.
Helen Margaret Muspratt was a British photographer.
Keturah Anne Collings (1862-1948) was a British painter and photographer.
Julian Augustus Romaine Smith FRPS (1873–1947) was a British-Australian surgeon and photographer.
