This page gathers photographers connected to United States and traces how each links to a period and movement in the history of photography.
Brady was the leading American portrait photographer of the 1840s–50s, building his reputation on photographs of presidents and public figures. He invested his own fortune in …
Gardner, born in Scotland, broke from Brady's organization during the Civil War and published Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865–66) with individual …
O'Sullivan contributed 44 of the 100 photographs in Gardner's Civil War Sketch Book — the most by any single photographer — then turned to western geological surveys after the …
Known for sequential multi-camera photographs of motion, Muybridge collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania on his landmark Animal Locomotion series and invented the …
A journalist, lecturer, and reformer as much as a photographer, Riis used flash photography, newspaper reports, books, and lantern-slide lectures to expose conditions in New …
Alfred Stieglitz helped change how photography was viewed by moving it from Pictorialism toward modern art through Camera Work, Gallery 291, and a carefully argued photography …
Gertrude Käsebier trained as a painter before turning to photography, bringing pictorialist light and composition to portraiture. Co-founder of the Photo-Secession with …
Steichen's starting point in Pictorialism was the judgment that looking like painting was photography's most effective strategy for winning artistic status equal to it. Born in …
Lewis Hine photographed in three landmark sites — Ellis Island immigrants, child workers in mines and factories, and the construction of the Empire State Building — …
Edward Weston moved away from early Pictorialist portraiture to reexamine industrial structures, the body, shells, vegetables, sand dunes, and rock formations as problems of …
American photographer who advanced straight photography in the 1910s by rejecting pictorialist imitation. Works such as The White Fence and New York [Blind Woman] mark a turning …
British-American photographer who moved from pictorialist lyricism to urban aerial views and then to abstract photographs made with a vortoscope. The Vortograph series of …
American-born artist who worked at the heart of Dada and Surrealism in Paris. Through Rayographs, solarisation and fashion photography, he transformed photography from a …
Artist who worked across photography, painting and film, visualising American architecture and industrial structure as precise modern order. Co-creator of the film Manhatta with …
Lange documented the destitution of migrant farmworkers for the FSA, creating the visual symbol of the Depression in Migrant Mother. Her record of Japanese American …
Walker Evans was an American photographer who placed signs, storefronts, streets, interiors, and sharecropper portraits within a frontality and serial structure that refuses to …
W. Eugene Smith extended photography from the single news flash to a long-form testimony that could be read for a person's work, fatigue, living conditions, and social …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed American industry, Soviet modernization, the founding of LIFE magazine, and the front lines of World War II, visualizing the machinery and …
From the Spanish Civil War to postwar Europe's children, Chim shaped the humanitarian language of documentary photography with a gaze at once gentle and politically committed …
John Vachon began as a file clerk for the FSA photographic unit and grew into a photographer under Roy Stryker's direction. Rather than symbolic images, he recorded the ordinary …
As one of the earliest staff photographers of the FSA photographic unit, Rothstein helped construct the visual memory of the Dust Bowl. The controversy over his repositioned …
As an FSA photographer Delano documented poverty in American farmland, coalfields, and railroads; after moving to Puerto Rico he was involved in the island's social …
Russell Lee produced the largest photographic archive among FSA photographers. His sustained documentation of rural communities, coal mining towns, and Japanese American …
Shahn participated in the FSA photographic unit while developing a visual language of social realism that crossed painting, murals, and posters. Though celebrated as a painter …
Ansel Adams photographed Yosemite and the American West through precise judgments of exposure, development, and printing — converting natural landscapes into a language of light …
Inheriting Alfred Stieglitz's concept of the Equivalent, Minor White organized landscapes, rocks, and surfaces of light into sequential structures functioning as equivalents of …
Levitt spent decades photographing children playing with chalk drawings on New York sidewalks, the improvised gestures of alleyways, and the human theater of street corners. Her …
Lee Miller was a photographer whose war photographs and Second World War reporting grew out of Surrealist darkroom work, Vogue photography, and a sharp understanding of how …
William Vandivert covered wartime Europe as a LIFE staff photographer and participated in the founding of Magnum Photos, helping to institutionalize the model of photographer …
Born in New York, Klein studied painting under Fernand Léger in postwar Paris and moved among American painters such as Ellsworth Kelly. Spotted in 1954 by Vogue's art director …
Garry Winogrand, born in the Bronx, began as a freelance magazine photographer in the 1950s and kept a 35mm Leica with him constantly, shooting fast on the street. His style has …
Lee Friedlander, born in Aberdeen, Washington, studied photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles from 1953 and worked from New York for magazines such as Esquire and …
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. Through blurred light …
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 …
Irving Penn was a photographer who extended the design intelligence he developed at Vogue into white backgrounds, worn theater curtains, natural light, still lifes, occupational …
Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait photographer who changed the look of postwar fashion photography through movement, performance, and modern magazine design …
Diane Arbus pushed postwar American portraiture beyond social documentation toward the exposure of the relationship between seeing and being seen. Through frontal portraits …
Cindy Sherman transformed photography from a medium associated with evidence, likeness, and authorial self-expression into a way of testing how cinema, advertising, magazines …
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in Flushing, New York, in 1946. After studying art at Pratt Institute he began photographing with a Polaroid camera in 1970, developing his …
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After studying under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel at Parsons, she became an art director at Condé Nast's Mademoiselle in …
William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939. He began shooting 35mm color film in the 1960s, and in 1976 MoMA presented 'William Eggleston's Guide,' curated by …
American photographer, born in 1947. Historical significance: Shore is important because he helped shift color photography into the center of art-photographic discourse and …
American photographer and visual artist, born in 1945 and died in 2014. Historical significance: he is significant because he helped redefine landscape photography as a study of …
American photographer, born in 1938. Historical significance: Meyerowitz is significant because he helped move color from marginal or commercial association into the center of …
American photographer, born in 1937. Historical significance: he is important because he made the damaged West one of the defining subjects of late twentieth-century …
American photographer, painter, and sculptor, born in 1936 and died in 2016. Historical significance: Christenberry matters because he demonstrated how a local and repeating …
American photographer, born in 1944. Historical significance: he is important because he showed how color, large format, and documentary observation could be combined into a …
Vietnamese American photographer, born in Saigon in 1960 and based in the United States. Historical significance: she is significant because she expanded the photographic …
Santos R. Vasquez is documented mainly through exhibition records while detailed sources on the work remain scarce. The archive treats the entry cautiously, as a source-gap case …
Annie Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer who began at Rolling Stone and later expanded her practice through Vanity Fair and Vogue, making people appear as charged …
She photographed her own nights — her lovers and friends — as if they were family snapshots. She showed that photography can exist precisely where the distance between …
American artist born in 1947, working in photography, sculpture, painting, and appropriation-based conceptual practice. Best known photographically for rephotographing already …
American photographer born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. Known for photographs that occupy the space between documentary fact and cinematic staging, especially through …
American photographer born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. Known for staged and semi-staged photographs of girls, road culture, motherhood, landscape, and American mythologies …
Korean-born artist born in 1970, active in New York from the 1990s, best known for the series *Projects*. Her work stages acts of social assimilation and self-transformation in …
American artist born in 1964 whose practice moves between photography and film. Known for long-term collaborative projects with communities, and for a formal rigor that slows …
Canadian-born artist born in 1962, based in Chicago, known for still-life and domestic interior photography. Her work shifted from portraiture toward still life in the late …
American artist born in 1951, active across photography, abstraction, architecture, and image history. Known for moving restlessly between camera-based and cameraless processes …
American artist born in 1953, known for photographing model constructions of architectural and institutional spaces. A central figure in staged and constructed photography from …
The Atlas Group / Walid Raad uses a fictional or quasi-fictional archive of the Lebanese wars to question how photographs, videos, documents, and lectures become evidence for …
American photographer born in 1969, known for mixing commercial, vernacular, and art-photographic image languages. His work became important in the 2000s as a challenge to the …
Cuban-American artist born in 1971, active across photography, drawing, sculpture, film, and installation, but first widely recognized through staged photographic tableaux. His …
Artist and photographer born in 1970, working with landscape, horizon, and urban form at large scale. His photography is central to late-1990s and 2000s discussions of …
American artist born in 1979, known primarily for image-based work spanning painting, installation, editions, and photography-related appropriation. His practice repeatedly …
Wangechi Mutu reworks fragments of ethnographic photography, fashion imagery, medical illustration, and photomontage to challenge colonial and gendered histories of the body.
Eve Sussman extends art-historical tableaux and photographic composition into film and installation, exploring how still images become unstable through duration, gesture, and …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Lucas Blalock (born 1978) is an American photographer who photographs ordinary objects with a large-format camera and leaves visible traces of Photoshop manipulation. His work …
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 …
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 …
Artie Vierkant (born 1986) is an American artist working across photography, sculpture, digital files, and online circulation. His Image Objects series treats exhibition …
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. The …