1970–1980s: Conceptual Art

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.

Daido Moriyama was born in Ikeda, Osaka, in 1938 into a family whose frequent moves — Tokyo, Hiroshima, Chiba, Shimane, Osaka — gave him what he later described as an instinct for wandering that became foundational to his practice.

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

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

British / Manx photographer, born in 1946 and died in 2020.

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 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.

Vietnamese American photographer, born in Saigon in 1960 and based in the United States.

Swedish photographer, born in 1944.

German artist and photographer, born in 1964.

Dutch photographer, born in 1972 in Alkmaar; studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Japanese photographer, born in 1939.

Japanese photographer and artist, born in 1948.

Japanese photographer, born in 1940 and died in 2019.

French artist born in 1955 in Reims, based in Paris; works across photography, objects, sculpture, and installations, though photography was central to his emergence on the contemporary art scene.

German photographer, born in 1958 in Moers and based in Hamburg; originally trained as a biologist.

American photographer, born in 1938.

American photographer, born in 1944.

Japanese photographer, born in 1946.

Japanese photographer, born in 1954.

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

Dutch artist and photographer, born in 1963 and based in Rotterdam.

Japanese photographer, born in 1950.

Japanese photographer, born in 1947 in Gunma and raised in Yokosuka.

American photographer, born in 1937.

Spanish artist, born in Madrid in 1966; works across installation, photography, video, and performance.

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

German photographer, born in 1962, associated with the Düsseldorf / Becher-school context while developing a distinct body of large-format color landscape work.

American photographer, born in 1947.

Japanese photographer and critic, born in 1938 and died in 2015.

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

Japanese documentary photographer, born in 1948.