Photography Masters

Biography: Portrait photographer Nadar

Biography: Portrait photographer Nadar

Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 23 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist. He is remembered as a photographer, for the portraits that he made of his great contemporaries. The Museum’s print of the Taylor portrait is a woodburytype, a kind of print in which the image is formed by ink…
Biography: Ken Domon

Biography: Ken Domon

Ken Domon (25 October 1909 – 15 September 1990) is one of the most renowned Japanese photographers of the 20th century. He is most celebrated as a photojournalist, though he may have been most prolific as a photographer of Buddhist temples and statuary. After WW2 Domon started with documenting the aftermath of the war, focusing on society and the lives…
Biography: Minor White

Biography: Minor White

Minor White (July 9, 1908 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minor White earned a degree in Botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while working as a…
Biography: Architecture photographer Jan Bulhak

Biography: Architecture photographer Jan Bulhak

Jan Bułhak (1876–1950) was a pioneer of photography in Poland and present-day Belarus and Lithuania, and one of the best-known Polish photographers of the early 20th century. A theoretician and philosopher of photography, he was among the most prominent exponents of pictorialism. He is best known for his landscapes and photographs of various places, especially the city of Vilnius (then…
Biography: Imogen Cunningham

Biography: Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham (April 12, 1883 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. In 1901, having sent away $15 for her first camera, she commenced what would become the longest photographic career in the history of the medium. Cunningham soon turned her attention to both the nude as well as native…
Biography: Herbert List

Biography: Herbert List

Herbert List (October 7, 1903–April 4, 1975) was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. Herbert List was a classically educated artist who combined a love of photography with a fascination for surrealism and classicism. Born into a prosperous Hamburg merchant family, List began an apprenticeship at a…
Biography: Documentary photographer Federico Peliti

Biography: Documentary photographer Federico Peliti

Federico Peliti (1844-1914) was an Italian photographer. He was born near Turin, in Northern Italy, and went to India in 1868 as a caterer to the Viceroy, the Earl of Mayo. After the assassination of the Viceroy, he established himself as an independent caterer and hotel director, with establishments in Calcutta and Simla. His Simla restaurant is mentioned in Rudyard…
Biography: Nude/Portrait photographer E. J. Bellocq

Biography: Nude/Portrait photographer E. J. Bellocq

E. J. Bellocq (1873 – 1949) was an American professional photographer who worked in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Knowledge of E. J. Bellocq barely transcends the level of rumor. This is true in the case of many exceptional photographers of the past, and it is especially true of professional photographers, who were less likely than amateurs (and…
Biography: Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange

Biography: Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. She studied photography at Columbia University and worked at a New York portrait studio until 1918…
Biography: City Life photographer Berenice Abbott

Biography: City Life photographer Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991), was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s. Abbott studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918 to study sculpture. While in New York, Abbott met Marcel Duchamp and Man…
Biography: Street photographer Garry Winogrand

Biography: Street photographer Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928, New York City – 19 March 1984, Tijuana, Mexico) was a street photographer known for his portrayal of the United States in the mid-20th century. Winogrand’s subject was America. He documented the city and the urban landscape, concentrating on its unusual people and capturing odd juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects. Winogrand began photographing in…
Biography: Josef Koudelka

Biography: Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka (born January 10, 1938) is a Czech photographer. He was trained at the Technical University in Prague and worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava from 1961-67. He had been able to obtain an old Rolleiflex and in 1961, while working as a theater photographer in Prague, he also started a detailed study of the gypsies…
Biography: Nude photographer Clarence Hudson White

Biography: Nude photographer Clarence Hudson White

Clarence Hudson White (April 8, 1871 – July 7, 1925) was an American photographer and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. During his lifetime he was widely recognized as a master of the art form for his consummate sentimental, pictorial portraits and for his excellence as a teacher of photography. Toward the end of his career he founded the…
Biography: Eugene Atget

Biography: Eugene Atget

Eugène Atget (February 12, 1857 – August 4, 1927) was a French pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. He became obsessed with making what he modestly called “documents” of the city and its environs, and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture,…
Biography: Alfred Stieglitz

Biography: Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz ( born January 1, 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer, art dealer, publisher, advocate for the Modernist movement in the arts. He was the son of Edward Stieglitz, a German Jew who came to the United States in 1849 and went on to make a comfortable fortune in the clothing business.…
Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Adolph de Meyer (1st September 1868 – 6 January 1946) was a photographer famed for his elegant photographic portraits in the early 20th century. He was also the first official fashion photographer for the American magazine Vogue, appointed to that position in 1913. Although de Meyer habitually fictionalized his biographical information, it is fairly certain that he was educated in…
Biography: People photographer Adam Clark Vroman

Biography: People photographer Adam Clark Vroman

Adam Clark Vroman was born April 15, 1856, in La Salle, Illinois. Died July 24, 1916, in Altadena, California. Vroman started working for the Railroad in 1874. In 1892, to improve his wife’s health, they moved to Pasadena, California. He began taking photographs in 1892. In 1895 he started work on a complete series of the California missions. That summer…
Biography: Portrait photographer Diane Arbus

Biography: Portrait photographer Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal”. Arbus believed that a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh” but its scrutiny revealed…
Biography: City Life/Street photographer Vivian Maier

Biography: City Life/Street photographer Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American amateur street photographer, who was born in New York City, but grew up in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for approximately forty years as a nanny in Chicago, Illinois. During those years, she took more than 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in…
Biography: Andre Kertesz

Biography: Andre Kertesz

André Kertész (2 July 1894 – 28 September 1985), born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved.…