United States Photographers

Mathew Brady became famous through portraits of major American figures and was widely regarded as the leading portrait photographer in the United States.

Timothy O'Sullivan was born around 1840, most likely in Ireland, and emigrated with his family to New York as a young child.

Gertrude Kasebier believed that a portrait should be almost biographical, revealing the sitter's essential temperament and humanity rather than merely recording appearance.

Stieglitz made 291 and Camera Work a bridge from pictorialism to modern photography as museum art.

Lewis Hine was an American photographer and trained sociologist who used the camera as an instrument of social reform.

Charles Sheeler was an American artist who moved between photography and painting and helped shape the visual language of American modernism.

Paul Strand's decisive break came in part from his first visit to Gallery 291 in 1907, where Lewis Hine introduced him to modern painting.

Dorothea Lange ran a commercial portrait studio in San Francisco, but during the depths of the Depression in 1932 she looked out her studio window, saw unemployed men standing in line in the street, and walked out toward documentary work.

Edward Weston began in pictorialist and studio photography before becoming a central figure of straight photography and Group f/64.

Walker Evans photographed rural poverty in the American South for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1937, yet he kept a deliberate distance from the agency's propagandistic purpose.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) was an American photographer who moved from Vogue fashion modeling into photography, traversing Surrealist experiment, fashion photography, and war reportage across a single career.

William Vandivert (1912-1989) was an American photographer, a staff photographer for Life magazine, and one of the founding members of Magnum Photos.

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Diane Arbus grew up in a prosperous Jewish family on Manhattan's Central Park West, insulated from the Depression and from any direct encounter with hardship or difference.

William Klein brought a painter's aggression to photography, using grain, blur, wide-angle distortion, and invasive closeness as a language of urban energy rather than as technical flaws.

Garry Winogrand made street photography feel fast, unstable, and improvisational.

Margaret Bourke-White was one of the most influential photographers of the magazine era and one of the first women to achieve global prominence in industrial, documentary, and war photography.

Lee Friedlander made what he called the social landscape, a photography not of untouched nature but of roads, storefronts, signs, windows, cars, and the built environment of modern America.

William Eggleston made ordinary Southern life central to fine-art color photography.

Ansel Adams is one of the central figures in the history of American landscape photography.

Arthur Rothstein was one of the best-known photographers of the Farm Security Administration and an important figure in the history of American documentary photography.

Helen Levitt transformed the street, especially the streets of New York, into one of the most subtle and inventive visual fields of modern photography.

John Vachon is an important photographer of the Farm Security Administration and of later American documentary culture.

Minor White was one of the most influential postwar American photographers, teachers, and editors.

Russell Lee was one of the most rigorous and sustained documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration.

Barbara Kruger turned the visual language of magazines and advertising back against itself.

Robert Mapplethorpe applied an austere classical sense of balance and form to subjects that American culture often kept sharply apart: flowers, celebrity portraits, Black male bodies, and explicit gay sexual imagery.

Born in 1916 and deceased in 2001, Louis Faurer is known for photographing New York in the 1940s and 1950s, especially Times Square and Fourteenth Street.

Nan Goldin made intimacy itself into photographic method.

Born in New Jersey in 1954, Cindy Sherman made her Untitled Film Stills between 1977 and 1980, a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs that seem to belong to 1950s and 1960s Hollywood movies, film noir, and European art cinema.

Born in Oklahoma in 1943, Larry Clark is a photographer and filmmaker best known for Tulsa (1971), a document of drugs, violence, and youth made from inside his own community.

American photographer, born in 1938.

American photographer, born in 1944.

American photographer and visual artist, born in 1945 and died in 2014.

American photographer, born in 1937.

Santos R. Vasquez is documented mainly through exhibition records while detailed sources on the work remain scarce.

American photographer, born in 1947.

American photographer, painter, and sculptor, born in 1936 and died in 2016.

American photographer born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York.

American photographer born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut.

American artist born in 1947, working in photography, sculpture, painting, and appropriation-based conceptual practice.

Cuban-American artist born in 1971, active across photography, drawing, sculpture, film, and installation, but first widely recognized through staged photographic tableaux.

American artist born in 1953, known for photographing model constructions of architectural and institutional spaces.

American artist born in 1951, active across photography, abstraction, architecture, and image history.

American artist born in 1979, known primarily for image-based work spanning painting, installation, editions, and photography-related appropriation.

American photographer born in 1969, known for mixing commercial, vernacular, and art-photographic image languages.

American artist born in 1964 whose practice moves between photography and film.

Artist and photographer born in 1970, working with landscape, horizon, and urban form at large scale.

Artie Vierkant (born 1986) is an American artist working across photography, sculpture, digital files, and online circulation.

Eileen Quinlan (born 1972) is an American photographer whose studio experiments with smoke, mirrors, Mylar, gels, expired film, and scanning develop a feminist form of photographic abstraction.

Kate Steciw (born 1978) is an American artist who draws images from the internet and stock-image databases, combining digital manipulation, Plexiglas, collage, and print structures.

Kelli Connell (born 1974) is an American photographer known for Double Life, in which one model is photographed in multiple roles and digitally composited as two figures.

Lucas Blalock (born 1978) is an American photographer who photographs ordinary objects with a large-format camera and leaves visible traces of Photoshop manipulation.

Rashid Johnson (born 1977 in Chicago) is an American artist whose early photographs used historical processes such as Van Dyke brown printing and staged portraiture to examine Black identity, double consciousness, and the politics of representation.

Ryan McGinley (born 1977) is an American photographer who first photographed New York downtown youth subcultures at close range and later staged outdoor nude road-trip images.

Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976) is an American artist who assembles art-historical, archival, and urban fragments into temporary sculptures, photographs them, and then dismantles them.

Shannon Ebner (born 1971, based in Los Angeles) is an American artist who builds letters and words from cardboard, wood, and concrete blocks, then photographs them as visual structures.