Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award.
Joel Meyerowitz is an American street, portrait and landscape photographer. He began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. In the early 1970s he taught photography at the Cooper Union in New York City.
Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Richard Misrach is an American photographer. He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic."
Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Anne Wardrope Brigman was an American photographer and one of the original members of the Photo-Secession movement in America.
William Carter was born in Los Angeles in 1934 and graduated from Stanford University in 1957. Moving to Berkeley, California, he became a professional photographer, writer and editor. Living in New York from 1961–63, Carter worked as an editor for publisher Harper & Row. Based in Beirut, Lebanon 1964-66, he published photographs and articles on subjects such as the Kurds of Iraq in Life, the Sunday Times, Geographical Magazine and others. In 1966-69 he freelanced from London doing assignments for The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and TWA’s Annual Report.
Harold Martin Feinstein was an American photographer.
Arthur Leipzig was an American photographer who specialized in street photography and was known for his photographs of New York City.
Connie Imboden was born in 1953 and is an American photographer known for her work in nudes, using reflections in water and mirrors. Her photographs are represented in many collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, as well as many other public and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas.
Kansuke Yamamoto was a photographer and poet. He was a prominent Japanese surrealist born in Nagoya, Japan.
John Forrest Harding is a San Francisco–based photographer best known for the color street photography that he has pursued for four decades. Harding is the author of several photography books, and has taught courses on photography at City College of San Francisco and College of Marin.
Arthur Ollman is an American photographer, author, curator, professor emeritus (San Diego State University, and founding director of The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. He served as MoPA director from 1983 to 2006, and as director of the School of Art, Design and Art History, SDSU, from 2006 to 2011. He was president of the board of directors for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and has authored and contributed to more than twenty-five books and catalogs.
Ron A. Jude is an American photographer and educator, living in Eugene, Oregon. His photography, which "often explores the relationship between people, place, nature and memory", has been published in a number of books. Jude works as a professor of art at the University of Oregon.
Winston Swift Boyer is an American fine art photographer living in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and is best known for his color photography of landscapes in the United States and Europe. Boyer's first gallery exhibition was in 1979. He has exhibited in Paris, Canada, New York City, Massachusetts, and California. His work is included in permanent collections in the Crocker Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Boyer is the author of American Roads, published by Little, Brown and Company, Bullfinch Press, a photographic chronicle of driving tours through the United States.
