Famous Street Photographers: A List of Street Photographers and the Lesson Each Teaches

Dates are birth and death years. Where only a birth year is given, the photographer is living as far as I know.

Street photography started when cameras got small enough to carry through a city. Eugène Atget photographed old Paris at dawn, mostly empty, as reference material for painters. Paul Strand made candid portraits in New York in 1916, including Blind, using a camera trick so people didn't know they were being photographed. André Kertész and Brassaï, both Hungarian, made Paris their stage in the 1920s and 1930s, Kertész with shapes and shadows and Brassaï at night.

Henri Cartier-Bresson brought it together. A Leica camera with a 50mm lens and a painter's eye for geometry gave him pictures like Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932). He co-founded Magnum Photos in 1947 with Robert Capa and others, and his book defined the idea of the decisive moment. You can see his work through the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Walker Evans took the opposite path: plain, frontal, almost documentary photographs of American signs and faces, including portraits made with a camera hidden in his coat on the New York subway.

No city shaped the genre more. The streets of New York gave these photographers crowds, contrast and endless material.

Helen Levitt photographed children playing in the streets of New York City from the late 1930s, their chalk drawings and masks included. She also tried filmmaking, co-making the short documentary film In the Street, and later moved into color. Weegee chased night crime with a flash. Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer, crossed the US on Guggenheim money and published The Americans (1958 in France, 1959 in the US), a book that still divides people and changed what a photobook could be.

In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art showed Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus together in the exhibition New Documents, curated by John Szarkowski. Winogrand shot relentlessly with a Leica and a 28mm lens and famously said he photographed to find out what something would look like photographed. Friedlander found little miracles in banal places. When I wrote about him years ago, the lesson I took was to look inward for pictures, not outward: the best ones are usually right under your nose. Arbus worked slowly and directly with her subjects.

Saul Leiter worked quietly in the East Village, photographing through steamed windows in color decades before anyone cared. His book Early Color (Steidl, 2006) made him famous late in life. William Klein did the opposite: loud, grainy, in your face. Roy DeCarava photographed Harlem in dark, soft tones, and Jill Freedman embedded herself with New York firefighters and police. Bruce Gilden still works the sidewalks with a flash at arm's length, one of the most copied and debated approaches in the genre.

Vivian Maier belongs here too. She was a nanny who photographed for decades, mostly with a Rolleiflex, in New York and Chicago. Her negatives were bought at auction in 2007 and her work only became known after her death. In a guest essay for Inspired Eye, the photographer J. H. Dricker drew a lesson from her that I still repeat: practice is more important than product. The Vivian Maier website shows the work.

For decades serious street photographers worked in black and white. Color film was expensive to print and magazines discouraged it. A few photographers pushed color anyway, and they are the reason color street photography is normal now.

• Ernst Haas made color photography move, with slow shutter speeds and blur that borders on abstract art. See my notes on Ernst Haas.
• Saul Leiter used color and layers of blur like a painter. See Saul Leiter.
• Fred Herzog shot Vancouver on Kodachrome from the 1950s, and the ordinary street scenes now read as history.
• The photographer Joel Meyerowitz switched to color in the 1970s and argued for it when few did.
• Alex Webb, a Magnum photographer, packs hard light and several people into complex, layered frames.
• Harry Gruyaert composes with fields of pure color.
• Raghubir Singh made dense, joyful color pictures of Indian streets.
• Martin Parr, the British photographer, used saturated color and daylight flash to look at British leisure with humour.

Plenty of the masters worked far from New York and Paris. Josef Koudelka photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 and Roma communities across Europe, with a raw emotional charge. Read more on Josef Koudelka. Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis gave Paris its tender, funny side, a style often called humanist photography. Tony Ray-Jones photographed the English at leisure in the 1960s, and Lars Tunbjörk did something similar for Sweden decades later, in offbeat color.

In Japan, the photographer Daido Moriyama made grainy, blurred, high contrast pictures with a compact camera, and his style still shapes Japanese photography. Any Japanese street photographer working today has to deal with his shadow. Fan Ho turned Hong Kong into theatre, with light and shadow as his stage; see my profile of Fan Ho. Ara Güler spent his life photographing Istanbul, and Sergio Larrain made dreamlike, layered pictures in Valparaíso, Chile. Trent Parke, the first Australian to join Magnum, turned harsh sunlight into a subject.

For Paris at night, start with Brassaï. And if you want to shoot where many of these photographers worked, my guide to the best street photography locations covers New York, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

The masters of the genre are not all in museums. Matt Stuart in London makes pictures out of coincidence and patience. Collectives like In-Public brought together street photographers from around the world in the 2000s. Many contemporary street photographers now share their body of work on Instagram and YouTube first, and books second.

That is useful, but it has a downside. When everyone looks at the same feed, everyone starts taking the same photos. One photographer on Reddit put it bluntly: "Everybody kind of takes the same photos of the same subjects with the same styles these days." The fix is to look further back. The photographers in the table above didn't have a feed to copy. They had to find their own way of seeing.

Many of these photographers moved between street and documentary work. A documentary photographer or photojournalist usually works on a story with a purpose, often for a magazine or an agency like Magnum. Photojournalism answers the question of what happened. Street photography is looser. It records life on the streets for its own sake, and the picture only has to work as a picture.

Jill Freedman and Mary Ellen Mark sit closer to documentary. Winogrand and Moriyama sit closer to pure street. Urban photography is a third neighbour: it is about the city and the urban landscape itself, with or without people in public. Most artists on this list crossed those lines whenever a project called for it, and several ended up in fine art museums next to painting.

The way they worked varied too. Candid street photography was the norm, but Arbus and Mark made street portraits with full contact with people. Most used wide or normal lenses with deep depth of field. Few used a telephoto, because being close is part of the visual language of the genre. Monochrome dominated until the 1970s.

Reading about these photographers, a pattern shows up. None of them won with gear. What they had was a way of seeing and the stubbornness to keep going. I describe it as the alignment of the eye, the heart and the mind:

• The eye is composition. Cartier-Bresson and Kertész are masters of where things sit in the frame. Start with my guide to photography composition.
• The heart is emotion. Koudelka and Mary Ellen Mark make you feel something first.
• The mind is the idea or the story. Robert Frank and Walker Evans make you think about a whole country.

Every great street photographer has all of it, with one side stronger. Minor White said something in an interview near the end of his life that stuck with me: everything has probably been photographed before, so the heart of the photographer has to show through. We all have the same world and the same mass-produced cameras. What differs is you.

1. Study one photographer at a time. Spend a week with one body of work. Buy or borrow the book, not just the best-of images online.
2. Name the move, not the look. Don't copy Fan Ho's shafts of light. Ask what he did: he picked a stage and waited for a figure. That move works anywhere.
3. Try it on your own streets. Take one lesson from the table and shoot only that for a day. Friedlander's lesson works on the road to work.
4. Compare your frames with theirs. Not to judge yourself, but to see where their frame is simpler or their timing is sharper.

This is how I built my own method. I studied how master photographers and painters organized their pictures, turned what I found into picture patterns, and made them the core of my street photography course. One of its bonuses is an interview with my co-author Don Springer, who spent time with Garry Winogrand and had long conversations with Minor White. If you are just starting, read street photography for beginners first. For photographers outside the street genre, see my list of famous photographers of all time.