50 Famous Photographers: A List of Photographers in History, From Ansel Adams to Annie Leibovitz

Where only a birth year is given, the photographer is living as far as I know.

In the 19th century, photography was a science experiment. Julia Margaret Cameron used soft focus on purpose to make portraits that felt like paintings. Eadweard Muybridge used a row of cameras in 1878 to prove that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground, and his motion studies still influence filmmaking.

Alfred Stieglitz spent his life arguing that photography belonged in the art world. His 1907 picture The Steerage was about shapes as much as people, and his gallery and his journal Camera Work gave photographers a home. Edward Steichen started as a painterly pictorialist, later shot fashion for Vogue, and curated The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, one of the most visited photography exhibitions ever.

On the West Coast, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams belonged to Group f/64, named after a tiny aperture that keeps everything sharp. Weston turned a bell pepper into a sculpture. Adams developed the Zone System with Fred Archer to control every tone from black to white, and started the photography department at the school that became the San Francisco Art Institute. Man Ray, in Paris, went the other way: rayographs made without a camera, and surrealism. His Le Violon d'Ingres sold for about $12.4 million in 2022, a record for a photograph at auction.

Documentary photography gave us some of the most famous photos in the world, and many were made to change something in the United States and beyond. Jacob Riis used flash to show New York slums in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Lewis Hine photographed child labor for the National Child Labor Committee, and his pictures helped change American law.

During the Depression, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to document rural America. The American photographer Dorothea Lange made Migrant Mother in 1936, a single frame with a whole narrative in it. Walker Evans photographed sharecroppers for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Gordon Parks made American Gothic in 1942, then worked for the Office of War Information, and in 1948 became the first African American photographer on the staff of Life. He later directed the film Shaft. Much of the FSA collection is now at the Library of Congress, free to browse online.

Life magazine made photojournalism and the photo essay famous. Margaret Bourke-White shot its first cover in 1936. W. Eugene Smith spent weeks with a doctor in Colorado for Country Doctor (1948), a model for every photo essay since. Robert Capa photographed the Spanish Civil War and the D-Day landings, and co-founded Magnum Photos with Cartier-Bresson and others in 1947. His rule is one I repeat to street photographers all the time: if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.

Later war photographers like Don McCullin and James Nachtwey kept that tradition going. Steve McCurry made Afghan Girl in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and it ran on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. Sebastião Salgado spent years on each of his projects, from manual workers to untouched landscapes.

Portrait photography produced some of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The greatest portrait photographers each found a different way to get past the mask people wear for a camera.

Yousuf Karsh famously pulled the cigar from Winston Churchill's mouth in 1941 and caught the scowl that followed. Richard Avedon put people against plain white and let nothing distract from the face, from portrait and fashion photography for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue to the drifters and workers of In the American West. Irving Penn squeezed famous sitters into a narrow corner. Arnold Newman invented the environmental portrait, like Igor Stravinsky beside the black curve of a piano lid. Diane Arbus photographed people on the margins with directness that still unsettles viewers.

Annie Leibovitz became the staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and later moved to Vanity Fair and Vogue. Her photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, made hours before Lennon was killed in 1980, is the picture most people know her for. Robert Mapplethorpe brought formal perfection and light and shadow to flowers and bodies.

In fashion, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, David Bailey and Peter Lindbergh each changed what a magazine page could look like. Nick Knight still pushes fashion into new media.

Color photography was once seen as vulgar in the art world. William Eggleston changed that with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, full of ordinary scenes from the American South. Stephen Shore did the same with a large format camera on road trips.

Cindy Sherman turned the camera on herself in the Untitled Film Stills (1977 to 1980), playing invented women from films that never existed. I'd put it among the most influential bodies of work by any artist of the 20th century, and the Museum of Modern Art bought the whole series. Andreas Gursky makes enormous, detailed prints. His Rhein II sold for about $4.3 million in 2011, at the time the most expensive photograph ever sold. Nan Goldin photographed her own friends and lovers in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs the sea and the horizon again and again, and the repetition becomes the point. You can see work by many of these photographers and artists in collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Steve McCurry, mentioned above, is still one of the best known photographers in the world thanks to one color portrait. In wildlife photography, Paul Nicklen is known for polar images published in National Geographic and for conservation work.

Street photography has its own canon, and it is where I spend most of my time. Henri Cartier-Bresson gave the genre its most famous idea, the decisive moment. André Kertész and Elliott Erwitt showed that shapes and humour can carry a picture on their own.

Five street photographers have their own profiles on this site:

• Fan Ho, for light and geometry in Hong Kong.
• Saul Leiter, for painterly color through glass.
• Josef Koudelka, for emotion and wide frames.
• Ernst Haas, for color in motion.
• Brassaï, for Paris by night.

For 40 masters of the genre in one table, see my list of famous street photographers. For their own words, read my photography quotes. For a close look at one master, start with my Daido Moriyama profile.

Look at this list of innovative photographers and a pattern shows up. The famous photographers in the world of photography rarely got there with better gear than other professional photographers of their time. They got there with one of two things, and the greatest had both:

• A new way of seeing. Weston's forms, Avedon's white backgrounds, Eggleston's color, Sherman's invented selves. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
• Something to say. Lange and Parks used pictures to make people care about other people.

I explain it with the eye, the heart and the mind. The eye is composition, the heart is emotion, and the mind is the idea behind the picture. Minor White, one of the most important figures in American fine art photography, said in an interview near the end of his life that everything has probably been photographed before, so the heart of the photographer has to show through. I agree. We all have the same world and the same cameras. What differs is what you bring.

That is also why studying masters works better than copying the latest trend. One photographer on Reddit summed up the problem: "when I look at other peoples work I feel it's worlds apart." The gap closes faster when you learn why a picture works, not just what it looks like. Start with what makes a good photograph.

1. Pick one photographer a month. Look at a whole book, not a greatest hits page. You learn more from the ordinary frames than from the famous one.
2. Name one move. Capa's is distance. Newman's is the environment. Write it down.
3. Shoot only that move for a day. A single constraint teaches more than a vague goal.
4. Look outside your genre. Portrait, fashion, cinema and painting all feed street photography. I built one bonus in my street photography course around Renaissance paintings for exactly this reason, and another is an interview with my co-author Don Springer about his time with Garry Winogrand and Minor White.

If you are new to shooting people in public, street photography for beginners is a good next step, and how to photograph strangers covers the portrait side.