1950–1960s: Postwar Reconstruction

Takeji Iwamiya developed a photographic practice on the border between document and formal inquiry, focusing on Japanese temples, gardens, craft objects, Buddhist sculpture, and vernacular tools.

Robert Frank was born into a Swiss Jewish family in Zurich and moved to New York in 1947, where he initially found work in fashion photography for Harper's Bazaar.

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.

Shomei Tomatsu made postwar Japan itself into his subject.

Born in 1933 and died in 2021, Kikuji Kawada is known as a member of VIVO and as the maker of The Map (1959–1965), one of the defining photobooks of postwar Japanese 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.

Born in 1934 and deceased in 2012, Masahisa Fukase is known for intensely personal photography centered on family, his wife Yoko, solitude, and psychic collapse.

Born in London in 1935, Don McCullin became one of the defining photojournalists of the postwar period through his coverage of Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Northern Ireland.

Born in Wales in 1936 and deceased in 2008, Philip Jones Griffiths is known as a Magnum photographer whose Vietnam Inc.

Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was a South African photographer who exposed apartheid from within the system that shaped his own daily life.

Nobuyoshi Araki built his art from the most intimate material available: his own life.

Born in East Prussia in 1924 and deceased in 2023, Dorothy Bohm moved to Britain as a refugee and built a long career in London through street photography and portraiture.

Born in the Netherlands in 1925 and deceased in 1990, Ed van der Elsken is known for Love on the Left Bank (1956), made out of his involvement with the bohemian subculture of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in postwar Paris.

Born in 1921 and deceased in 2022, Hideo Haga spent decades recording festivals, folklore, and vernacular custom across Japan at a moment when rapid modernization threatened to erase them.

Born in Lithuania in 1911 and deceased in 1980, Izis Bidermanas, known simply as Izis, worked in France after the Second World War and became one of the representative figures of French humanist photography.

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.

Working in Bamako, Mali, from the 1940s through the 1960s, Seydou Keïta opened a path toward an African photographic modernity through studio portraiture.

Takeyoshi Tanuma recorded postwar Japanese civic life and the transformation of Tokyo across more than sixty years, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Born in Yamagata in 1933, Eikoh Hosoe developed theatrical and symbolic black-and-white series through collaboration with dancers and writers in postwar Japanese avant-garde culture.

Born in 1940 and deceased in 2024, Kishin Shinoyama became known for a vast practice ranging from celebrity portraiture and nude photography to architecture, magazines, and photobooks.

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.