1930–1940s: The Great Depression

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.

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.

George Rodger (1908-1995) was a British photographer who worked as a war correspondent during World War II and later devoted himself to long-term documentary projects in Africa.

Henri Cartier-Bresson encountered Surrealism from 1926 onward and, through Rene Crevel, came into contact with Andre Breton.

Ken Domon's postwar call for "realist photography" grew out of two dissatisfactions: the salon photography of the prewar years, with its emphasis on technical prettiness, and his own experience participating in wartime propaganda imagery.

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

Robert Capa was a persona invented in Paris in 1933 by the Hungarian-born Andre Friedmann and Gerda Taro, partly so his pictures could command higher prices on the freelance market.

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Bill Brandt was one of the most important British photographers of the twentieth century.

Brassai became famous for making Paris at night into one of the defining visual worlds of modern photography.

Hasegawa Denjiro appears in the record of modern Japanese photography as a figure connected to the interwar photographic field, especially to the spread of modern photographic practice and discourse.

Francois Kollar was a photographer of work, industry, and modern labor whose images occupy an important place between modernist form and documentary attention.

Suzuki Hachiro belongs to the generation of Japanese photographers working in the interwar period when photography was being redefined through modernist experimentation, publishing, and urban visual culture.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo is one of the central figures of twentieth-century Mexican photography.

Marcel Bovis was a French photographer whose work is closely tied to Paris, urban night scenes, and the poetic possibilities of the modern city.

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.

Robert Doisneau is often remembered through the mythology of poetic Paris, but his work is more than sentimental street charm.

Kanamaru Shigene was an important figure in modern Japanese photography, active as both photographer and critic in the interwar period.

Ueda Shoji developed one of the most distinctive photographic languages in modern Japan.

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.

Ben Shahn is better known as a painter, but his photography is an essential part of the New Deal documentary field and of his broader political vision.

David Seymour, known as Chim, was one of the major photojournalists of the twentieth century and a founding member of Magnum Photos.

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

Jack Delano was an FSA photographer and later an important documentarian of railroad life, labor, music, and everyday culture in Puerto Rico and the United States.

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

Kageyama Koyo was a Japanese photographer associated with modern and documentary-oriented photographic culture in the interwar and wartime decades.

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.