Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist. Miller was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, becoming a fashion and fine-art photographer there.
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
Bettie Mae Page was an American model who gained notoriety in the 1950s for her pin-up photos. She was often referred to as the "Queen of Pinups": her long jet-black hair, blue eyes, and trademark bangs have influenced artists for generations. After her death, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner called her "a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society".
Esther Bubley was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives. She worked for several agencies of the American government and her work also featured in several news and photographic magazines.
Ruth Orkin was an American photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker, with ties to New York City and Hollywood. Best known for her photograph An American Girl in Italy (1951), she photographed many celebrities and personalities including Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Ava Gardner, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Laurie Simmons is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Marvin Elliott Newman was an American artist and photographer.
Karl Bissinger was an American photographer best known for his portraits of notable figures in the world of art following World War II with regular travel and fashion features in popular magazines of the mid-twentieth century. Bissinger’s career as a photographer took second place to his later work as an activist for the War Resisters League and other pacifist organizations.
Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer whose work was discovered and recognized after her death. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed around the world.
Beatrice Tonnesen was an American artist and photographer based in Chicago, Illinois, from approximately 1896 to 1930. She is credited with having pioneered the use of photographs of live models in print advertising. In addition, her photos, and illustrations by leading artists based on her photos, were widely used in the calendar art of the era.
Louise Ozelle Martin was an American professional photographer who received recognition for her photographs of Houston Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and beyond. She is known as a pioneer for African-American female photographers.
Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Abigail Heyman (1942–2013) was an American photographer, photojournalist, and educator. She was the a department director and a teacher at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, in the mid-1980s until the 1990s. She published Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal in 1974.
David Martin Heath was an American documentary, humanist and street photographer.
Suzanne Szasz was a Hungarian-born American photographer of children and family life.
Vivian Cherry was an American photographer best known for her street photography. She was a member of the New York Photo League.
Eva Grant was a Turkish-born Greek and British glamour photographer who worked in the male-dominated glamour industry of the 1950s and early 1960s. She worked and lived in Britain and became known for her nude studies and her pocket magazine Line and Form, which ran for over forty issues.
Simpson Kalisher was an American professional photojournalist and street photographer whose independent project Railroad Men attracted critical attention and is regarded as historically significant.
