Documentary Photography

Charles Marville began as an illustrator and engraver before turning to photography.

Fenton, trained as a lawyer, became one of the key figures behind the founding of the Royal Photographic Society in 1853.

Alexander Gardner was born in 1821 near Glasgow, Scotland.

Mathew Brady became famous through portraits of major American figures and was widely regarded as the leading portrait photographer in the United States.

Thomas Annan was commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust to photograph old closes and streets marked for clearance under nineteenth-century urban reform.

Felice Beato was one of the earliest globally mobile photographers, following British and French imperial campaigns from the Crimean War onward.

Tomishige Rihei (born Shinokura Rihei, 1837–1922) is one of the most significant figures in Kyushu's photographic history.

Timothy O'Sullivan was born around 1840, most likely in Ireland, and emigrated with his family to New York as a young child.

Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark to the United States in 1870 and knew poverty first-hand before becoming a reporter.

Peter Henry Emerson argued that photography should be truthful to human vision rather than to studio convention.

Atget did not take up the camera until around 1897, when he was about forty.

Kamei Koreaki was a Japanese photographer and aristocratic patron active in the late Meiji period, remembered above all for the role he played in introducing and supporting Pictorialist ideas in Japan.

Torii Ryuzo was a Japanese anthropologist and photographer whose work is crucial to understanding the relationship between photography, ethnography, and imperial knowledge in modern East Asia.

Paul Geniaux was a French photographer associated with late Pictorialism and with the broader effort to secure photography's standing as an art at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lewis Hine was an American photographer and trained sociologist who used the camera as an instrument of social reform.

Paul Strand's decisive break came in part from his first visit to Gallery 291 in 1907, where Lewis Hine introduced him to modern painting.

André Kertész was a Hungarian-born photographer whose work helped define the lyric, modern possibilities of the medium between the wars.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Garry Winogrand made street photography feel fast, unstable, and improvisational.

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 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.

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

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

Sebastiao Salgado moved from economics to photography because he felt that numbers and reports could not convey human suffering with the force that images might.

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

Martin Parr changed documentary photography by bringing saturated color, electronic flash, and intrusive closeness into the depiction of ordinary British life.

Nan Goldin made intimacy itself into photographic method.