Photography Masters

Biography: Nude photographer Frantisek Drtikol

Biography: Nude photographer Frantisek Drtikol

Frantisek Drtikol (1883 – 1961) was a Czech photographer especially known for his nudes and portraits. Dritikol was born in 1883 in a mining town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he rose to become a prominent artist and famed portraiture photographer. Drtikol grew up with a desire to draw and paint. After a period of military service, he…
Biography: War photographer Robert Capa

Biography: War photographer Robert Capa

Robert Capa (October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy…
Biography: Street photographer Helen Levitt

Biography: Street photographer Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009) was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for “street photography” around New York City, and has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.” She realized from conversations with Cartier-Bresson that photography could be an art form in itself and did not always have to be…
Biography: Architecture photographer Samuel Gottscho

Biography: Architecture photographer Samuel Gottscho

Samuel Herman Gottscho (February 8, 1875 – January 28, 1971) was an American architectural, landscape, and nature photographer. After attending several architectural photograph exhibitions, Gottscho decided to perfect and improve his own work and sought out several architects and landscape architects. After twenty-three years as a traveling lace and fabric salesman, Gottscho became a professional commercial photographer at the age…
Biography: Raghu Rai

Biography: Raghu Rai

Raghu Rai was born in 1942 in the small village of Jhhang, now part of Pakistan. He took up photography in 1965, and the following year joined “The Statesman” newspaper as its chief photographer. Impressed by an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1971, Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977. Rai left “The Statesman” in…
Biography: Landscape photographer Ansel Adams

Biography: Landscape photographer Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984) was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West. With more than half a century of camera work behind him, Ansel Adams stands as one of America’s greatest landscape photographers. His career is punctuated with countless elegant, handsomely composed, and technically flawless photographs of magnificent natural landscapes. No contemporary…
Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

August Sander (1876 – 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. August Sander set for himself a problem that ranks among the most ambitious in the history of photography: He assigned himself the project of making a photographic portrait of the German people. He set about his task as systematically as a taxonomist, gathering, specimen by specimen, exemplary players…
Biography: Fashion/Nude photographer Helmut Newton

Biography: Fashion/Nude photographer Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. He was a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.” Newton led the ultimate glamorous life. He lived in the Chateau Marmont in the winter months, to keep the cold and gloom at bay, befriending Billy Wilder, Dennis Hopper…
Biography: Fashion photographer Horst P. Horst

Biography: Fashion photographer Horst P. Horst

Horst P. Horst (August 14, 1906 – November 18, 1999) was a German-American fashion photographer. The first pictures that carried a Horst credit line appeared in the December 1931 issue of French Vogue. It was a full-page advertisement showing a model in black velvet holding a Klytia scent bottle in one hand with the other hand raised elegantly above it……
Biography: photographer Eustachy Kossakowski

Biography: photographer Eustachy Kossakowski

Eustachy Kossakowski was born in 1925 into old Polish nobility. His grandfather Stanisław Kossakowski (1837-1905), was one of the founders of the Photographic Society in Warsaw and was the author of approximately sixty large albums of photographs showing life in the country manor in Lithuania at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The collection is…
Biography: Josef Sudek

Biography: Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976, Prague) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague. Originally a bookbinder, Sudek was badly injured during action by the Hungarian Army on the Italian Front of World War I in 1916. Although he had no experience with photography and was one-handed due to his amputation,…
Biography: City Life photographer Fan Ho

Biography: City Life photographer Fan Ho

Ho Fan (born October 8, 1937) is a Chinese Photographer, Film director and Actor. He has won over 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions worldwide since 1956 for his photography. Fan Ho was born in Shanghai in 1937, but immigrated with his family to Hong Kong at an early age. Ho began photographing at a very young age with…
Biography: Eugene Smith

Biography: Eugene Smith

Eugene Smith (December 30, 1918 – October 15, 1978) was an American photojournalist. He took his first photographs at the age of 15 for two local newspapers. In 1936 Smith entered Notre Dame University in Wichita, where a special photographic scholarship was created for him. A year later he left the university and went to New York City, and after…
Biography: Edward Weston

Biography: Edward Weston

Edward Weston (born March 24, 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois – January 1, 1958) was a an American photographer. He started with photography at the age of 16 when his father gave him first camera. Over forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. In 1947…
Biography: Bill Brandt

Biography: Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, 2 May 1904 – 20 December 1983), was a German-British photographer and photojournalist. Although born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his high-contrast images of British society, his distorted nudes and landscapes, and is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.…
Biography: Portrait photographer Man Ray

Biography: Portrait photographer Man Ray

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.…
Biography: City Life/Street photographer Arthur Leipzig

Biography: City Life/Street photographer Arthur Leipzig

Arthur Leipzig (born October 25, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American photographer who specializes in street photography and is known for his photographs of New York City. After studying photography at the Photo League in 1942, he became a staff photographer for the Newspaper PM, where he worked for the next four years. During this period, he completed…
Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Richard Avedon

Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that “his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.” Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Upon his return…
Biography: City Life photographer Alice Austen

Biography: City Life photographer Alice Austen

Alice Austen (March 17, 1866 – June 9, 1952) was one of America’s earliest and most prolific female photographers. Alice became interested in photography when her uncle, Oswald Müller, brought home a camera around 1876. Alice’s uncle Peter Townsend Austen was a chemistry professor at Rutgers who taught her photographic processing. Peter and Oswald converted a closet on the second…
Biography: Portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh

Biography: Portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was an Armenian-Canadian photographer, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time. Karsh was born in Armenia in 1908 and grew up under the horrors of the Armenian massacres. His photographer uncle, George Nakash, brought him to Canada in 1924. After an apprenticeship in Boston with…