Conceptual Photography

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Japanese photographer and artist, born in 1948.

American photographer, born in 1947.

Swedish artist and photographer born in 1967 in Gothenburg.

British photographer born in 1956, later based in the United States.

American photographer born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut.

American artist born in 1947, working in photography, sculpture, painting, and appropriation-based conceptual practice.

French artist born in 1953, working across photography, text, installation, and performative investigation.

German photographer born in 1958, associated with the Düsseldorf school and a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Japanese artist born in 1951 in Osaka, working across photography, self-portraiture, performance, and appropriation-based installation.

German photographer born in 1951, associated with the Düsseldorf School.

Austrian artist born in 1954, best known for the expanded field of sculpture, but also deeply engaged with photography as a necessary part of the work’s conception and circulation.

American artist born in 1953, known for photographing model constructions of architectural and institutional spaces.

American artist born in 1951, active across photography, abstraction, architecture, and image history.

Canadian-born artist born in 1962, based in Chicago, known for still-life and domestic interior photography.

Austrian photographer born in 1952, also active as curator and editor, especially through Camera Austria.

Korean-born artist born in 1970, active in New York from the 1990s, best known for the series *Projects*.

American artist born in 1964 whose practice moves between photography and film.

German artist born in 1964, trained first as a sculptor before turning to photography in the 1990s.

Australian artist born in 1960 whose practice spans photography, film, montage, and staged image-making.

German artist born in 1968 whose work spans photography, installation, publishing, and political image-making.

Artie Vierkant (born 1986) is an American artist working across photography, sculpture, digital files, and online circulation.

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 photographic abstraction.

Jessica Eaton (born 1977 in Canada) uses RGB filters and multiple exposures to generate abstract color structures inside the camera.

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 structures.

Lucas Blalock (born 1978) is an American photographer who photographs ordinary objects with a large-format camera and leaves visible traces of Photoshop manipulation.

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 Black identity, double consciousness, and the politics of representation.

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 them.

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 structures.

Viviane Sassen (born 1972 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch photographer whose work crosses fine art and fashion through saturated color, deep shadow, fragmented bodies, and concealed faces.

Amalia Ulman (born 1989 in Argentina) is an Argentine-Spanish artist who staged Excellences & Perfections on Instagram and Facebook in 2014.