Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name Eadweard as the original Anglo-Saxon form of Edward, and the surname Muybridge, believing it to be similarly archaic.
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 homosexual 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 Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. 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.
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression.
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.
Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.
Mowry Baden is an American sculptor who has lived and worked in Canada since 1975. He is known for his gallery-based kinaesthetic sculptures and for his public sculpture, both of which require a strong element of bodily interaction on the part of the viewer.
Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanford University.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson's work in media-based technology helped legitimize digital art forms.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Hank Willis Thomas is an American conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.
Richard Gordon was an American photographer who photographed all over America for more than 40 years.
Alyson Shotz is a contemporary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born at Luke Air Force Base, Glendale, Arizona, she graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and an MFA from the University of Washington in 1991.
Larry Sultan was an American photographer from the San Fernando Valley in California. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco 1989 to 2009.
Leo Millard Holub was an American photographer famous for his landscapes and architectural images of San Francisco, and photographs of Yosemite. His contemporaries and close friends included Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham.
Peter Wegner is an American artist whose works consist of paintings, photographs, collages, prints, artist's books, and large-scale installations.
Christopher Felver is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker who has published several books of photos of public figures, especially those in the arts, most notably those associated with beat literature. He has made numerous films, including a documentary on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, released in 2013.
Charles Betts Waite was an American photographer who worked in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. He signed his work C. B. Waite, and his full name is often mistakenly stated as Charles Burlingame Waite.
Geoffrey Lea Winningham is an American photographer, journalist, and filmmaker best known for his photographs and documentary films focusing on Texas and Mexican culture. Geoff's work was first recognized in the early 1970s when he published the book Friday Night in the Coliseum, featuring his photographs of professional wrestling and recorded conversations with wrestlers and fans. The book was followed in 1972 by a 16mm, black and white documentary film of the same title.
