Portrait Photography

Julia Margaret Cameron was already forty-eight when her daughter gave her a camera in 1863.

Nadar, born Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, entered photography around 1853 after careers in journalism and caricature had already connected him to the leading figures of French culture.

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

Gertrude Kasebier believed that a portrait should be almost biographical, revealing the sitter's essential temperament and humanity rather than merely recording appearance.

August Sander's vast portrait project People of the Twentieth Century grew in part from the prestige that physiognomy still held in early twentieth-century Germany.

Edward Steichen first embraced pictorialism because he believed photography could only claim equal status with painting if it looked painterly.

Nojima Yasuzo was one of the most important Japanese photographers of the interwar period and a key figure in the move from pictorial softness toward a more rigorous modern photographic language.

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 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.

Pieter Hugo (born 1976 in Johannesburg) is a South African photographic artist based in Cape Town.