Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.
Loretta Lux is a fine art photographer known for her surreal portraits of young children. She lives and works in Ireland.
Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 17 other publications.
Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography.
Dayanita Singh is an Indian photographer whose primary format is the book. She has published fourteen books.
Zoe Leonard is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
Susan Bright is a British writer and curator of photography, specializing in how photography is made, disseminated and interpreted. She has curated exhibitions internationally at institutions including: Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago amongst others.
Bertien van Manen is a Dutch photographer. She started her career as a fashion photographer, after having studied French and German languages and literature. Inspired by Robert Frank's The Americans she travelled around, photographing what she saw. She had her first exhibition in The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1977 and since then her work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Van Manen's work is found in major public collections.
JoAnn Verburg is an American photographer. Verburg is married to poet Jim Moore, who is frequently portrayed as reading the newspaper or napping in her photographs. She lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota and Spoleto, Italy.
Hellen van Meene is a Dutch photographer known especially for her portraits.
Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Jitka Hanzlová is a Czech photographer, mostly known for her portraiture.
Melissa Ann Pinney is an American photographer best known for her closely observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American girls and women. Pinney's photographs have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, including Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad.
Bieke Depoorter is a Belgian photographer. The relationships she establishes with her subjects lie at the foundation of her practice. Depoorter is a member of Magnum Photos and has published the books Ou Menya (2011), I am About to Call it a Day (2014), As it May Be (2017), Mumkin. Est-ce possible? (2018), Sète#15 (2015), and Agata (2021). She has won the Magnum Expression Award, The Larry Sultan Award, and the Prix Levallois. She is one of four shortlisted for the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Sarah Pickering is a British visual artist working with photography and related media including 3D scanning and digital rendering, performance, appropriated objects and print. Her artist statement says she is interested in "fakes, tests, hierarchy, sci-fi, explosions, photography and gunfire." She is based in London.
Jungjin Lee is a Korean photographer and artist who currently lives and works in New York City.
Ann Mandelbaum is an American artist and photographer. She has an MA in Media Studies from The New School and an MFA from Pratt Institute in Painting and Drawing. She retired in 2021 after over 40 years teaching Fine Art and Photography at Pratt Institute.
Sanna Kannisto is a Finnish photographer who is noted for her photographs taken in rainforests and for her studio photographs of birds.
