20 Famous Photographers

20 Famous Photographers
Ngoc (Alice) Le

1. James P. Blair
He is famous for his photographs that have appeared in National Geographic. I love the grittiness of his Personal Work : An Homage to Aaron Siskind. The close-up images of fragments of walls, signs, and graffiti from their usual frame of visual reference, produces photographs that convey emotional content through abstract form.

2. Regina DeLuise
I like the soft subtleness of her works and the combination of textures and everyday objects.

3. Garry Winogrand
He was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid 20th century. Many of his photographs depict the social issues of his time day and in the role of media in shaping attitudes. He roamed the streets of New York with his 35mm Leica camera rapidly taking photographs using a prefocused wide angle lens. His pictures frequently appeared as if they were driven by the energy of the events he was witnessing. While the style has been much imitated, Winogrand's eye, his visual style, and his wit, are unique.

4. Man Ray
"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it."
Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is noted for his photograms, which he renamed rayographs after himself. I really love the fashion and portrait photography he did in the 1920’s (it’s one of my favorite eras). I’m hugely obsessed with fashion and I love doing self-portraits also.

5. Joel-Peter Witkin
I love his interpretations of artwork in his work. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (or pieces of them), and various outsiders such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. His complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect.

6. Diane Arbus
She was an American photographer, noted for her portraits of people on the fringes of society, such as transvestites, dwarfs, giants, prostitutes and ordinary working class citizens, in unconventional poses and settings.

7. Larry Clark
He is an American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for the movie Kids. His most common subject is youth that casually engage in underage and illegal drug use, sex, and violence, and who are part of a subculture (such as punk or skateboarding).

8. Clarence John Laughlin
Although he dropped out of high school in 1920, after having barely completed his freshman year, Laughlin was an educated and highly literate man. His large vocabulary and love of language are evident in the elaborate captions he later wrote to accompany his photographs. Many historians credit Laughlin as being the first true surrealist photographer in the United States. His images are often nostalgic

9. Barbara Kruger
Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases included in her work are usually declarative, and make common use of such pronouns as "you," "I," "we," and "they." The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and misogyny and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work. I am wondering if I could do photograms in combination with negatives to achieve her style. I could cut out the letters and overlap them on the picture. I really love the graphic quality and underlying messages of her work.


10. Cindy Sherman
Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. Sherman's most recent series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines.


11. Emmet Gowin
Gowin first gained attention with his intimate portraits of his wife and family. His almost exclusive use of a large format camera led to both optical and darkroom experiments. Using a 4x5 lens with an 8x10 camera allowed Gowin to expose the full image circle, surrounded by a dramatic vignette, in his family portraits and rural landscapes. Beginning with a trip to Washington State soon after Mt. Saint Helens erupted, Gowin began taking aerial photographs. For the next twenty years, Gowin captured strip mining sites, nuclear testing fields, large-scale agricultural fields and other scars in the natural landscape.

12. William Klein
As an artist using photography, he set out to re-invent
the photographic document. His photos, often blurred or out of focus, his high-contrast prints (his negatives were often severely over-exposed), his use of high-grain film and wide angles shocked the established order of the photography world and he earned a reputation as an anti-photographer's photographer.

13. Joel Meyerowitz
Joel Meyerowitz is a street photographer who began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. Meyerowitz has published a photographic archive of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and was the only photographer allowed unrestricted access to ground zero immediately following the attack.

14.Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft.

15. Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.

16. Lothar Wolleh
He was a well-known German photographer. Until the end of the sixties, Lothar Wolleh worked as a commercial photographer. He took portraits of international contemporary painters, sculptors and performance artists. Altogether, he photographed about 109 artists, including known personalities such as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely, René Magritte, Günther Uecker, Gerhard Richter and Christo.


17. Henri Cartier-Bresson
He was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed.

18. Leslie Robert (Les) Krims
He is a conceptualist photographer living in Buffalo, New York. He is noted for his carefully arrange fabricated photographs (called "fictions"), various candid series, a satirical edge, dark humor, and long-standing criticism of what he describes as leftist twaddle.

19. Andres Serrano
He is an American photographer who has become most notorious through his photos of corpses, as well as his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. His work is borderline creepy, especially with the juxtaposition of urine and symbols of Christianity.

20. John Ernest Joseph Bellocq
He was a professional photographer who worked in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Bellocq is remembered for his haunting photographs of the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans' legalized red light district. These have inspired novels, poems and films.