Photo Coordinates

At a time when photography was not yet recognized as art, he invented the very venues for showing it — through his gallery and journal. He built the institution before the work had anywhere to land.

A photographer who tried to sever the circuit connecting the act of shooting to the production of meaning. He later burned his own negatives, and kept asking whether photography might be nothing more than the act of seeing itself.

By casting herself as the subject of film-still-style self-portraits, she stripped away — from within the photograph — who constructs "the image of woman" and how.

Photographing sharecroppers in the American South head-on and at an even distance, stripped of sentiment, he introduced a different grammar into documentary — seeing structure rather than lyricism.

With a single book, The Americans, he established the photobook as a medium read through sequence and spacing. He invented the idea of seeing photographs as a sequence rather than as individual decisive moments.

The city doesn't precede the camera — it seeps out from the grain of a camera that keeps walking. He preserved the rawness of the act of seeing itself.

They photographed water towers and blast furnaces endlessly under identical conditions, then arranged the results in grids. They opened up a use for photography that is not about speaking in a single image, but about placing images side by side for comparison.

The person who decided the shutter is a tool for cutting things out of time. He made the discipline of finding the instant when form and timing resolve together the professional photographer's standard.

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 photographer and subject disappears.

She stood properly in front of people who had been consumed as spectacle, met their gaze, and photographed them as equal subjects. She updated photography's ethics of who can be faced squarely by the camera.

An immense undertaking: classifying and photographing his contemporaries in Germany by occupation and social class, then arranging them in sequence. One of the earliest practitioners to deploy photography as a device for ordering society.

He turned his honeymoon into a self-published book and established the term "I-photography" (shishashin). He invented the editorial gesture of connecting the boundaries between everyday life, sexuality, and death through the sequencing of a photobook.