Art and Culture/Photography

Photographers

Ansel Adams was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of California's Yosemite Valley

Diane Arbus was an American photographer, noted for her portraits of people on the fringes of society

Eve Arnold joined Magnum Photos in 1951. Her images of Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits (1961) were perhaps her most memorable, but she had taken many photos of Monroe

Eugene Atget was a French photographer noted for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris

Richard Avedon was an American fashion photographer. In the American West – photo book by Richard Avedon

Cecil Beaton is best known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood. Cecil Beaton is also known for his photos of the Queen's coronation in 1953

Brassai (pseudonym of Gyula Halasz) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century

Mick Burke was an English mountaineer and climbing cameraman, who covered many British-led mountaineering expeditions during the 1960s and 1970s. He died on Chris Bonington's 1975 Everest expedition

Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes, taken between 1864 and 1875

Robert Capa was a Hungarian photographer who covered five different wars. Died in Indochina in 1954. The Falling Soldier by Robert Capa was taken in 1936 and long thought to depict the death of a Republican soldier during the Spanish Civil War, but there are significant doubts about its authenticity

Henri Cartier-Bresson worked only in black-and-white. Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa were among the founders of Magnum Photos in Paris in 1947

Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon in 1839

Robert Doisneau used a Leica on the streets of Paris in the 1930s; together with Henri Cartier-Bresson he was a pioneer of photojournalism. He is renowned for his 1950 image Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris

Terence Donovan was a celebrated British photographer and film director, perhaps best remembered for his fashion photography of the 1960s, or for the music video to Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love

Richard Drew is best known for The Falling Man, a photograph by of a man jumping from the Twin Towers on 9/11

Brian Duffy was an English photographer and film producer, best remembered for his fashion and portrait photography of the 1960s and 1970s

Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German-American photographer who is best known for his photograph capturing the celebration of V-J Day

Roger Fenton was one of the first war photographers. Photographed the Crimean War

Robert Frank is an American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work is the 1958 book titled The Americans. The photographs are notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society

Nan Goldin shot the heroin series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency between 1979 and 1986

Andreas Gursky is a German photographer who has created two of the four most expensive photographs in the world

Rhein II was produced as the second (and largest) of a set of six depicting the River Rhine

99 Cent II Diptychon shows the cluttered interior of a discount store

Albert Kahn was an Edwardian photographer. Produced some of the earliest colour photographs

Yousuf Karsh was a Canadian photographer of Armenian heritage, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time. Famous portrait of Churchill on the cover of Life magazine

Alberto Korda was a Cuban photographer, remembered for his famous 1960 image Guerrillero Heroico of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA)

Annie Leibovitz is an American photographer of celebrities. Worked for Rolling Stone magazine from 1970 to 1983. On 8December 1980, Leibovitz had a photo shoot with John Lennon for Rolling Stone

Patrick Lichfield was selected to take the official photographs of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981, and subsequently became one of the UK's best-known photographers. From 1999 onwards he was a pioneer of digital photography at a professional standard. He was chosen by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to take official pictures of her Golden Jubilee in 2002

Darryn Lyons was the owner of Big Pictures, the biggest picture agency in Britain, until it was placed into administration in 2012. He entered politics in 2013, when he was elected Mayor of Geelong

Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men. His most controversial work is that of the underground bondage and sadomasochistic BDSM scene of New York

Iain Macmillan was the Scottish photographer famous for taking the cover photograph for The Beatles' album Abbey Road in 1969

Don McCullin is a British photojournalist, particularly recognized for his war photography and images of urban strife. Between 1966 and 1984, he worked as an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine, recording catastrophes such as Biafra, in 1968, and victims of the African AIDS epidemic. His coverage of the Vietnam War and the Northern Ireland conflict is highly regarded

Steve McCurry is best known for his photograph Afghan Girl which originally appeared in National Geographic magazine

Lee Miller was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Assistant to Man Ray. Married Roland Penrose. Amongst her circle of friends were Pablo Picasso, Paul Eluard, and Jean Cocteau

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston-upon-Thames. Many photos of Yosemite. In 1877 photos of Leland Stanford’s horse Occident proved that a horse ran with all four legs off the ground at one point. Created the zoopraxiscope, the first movie projector. Worked with Etienne Jules de Marey in Paris

Helmut Newton was a German / Australian fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue

Herbert Ponting is best known as the expedition photographer and cinematographer for Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in France. he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.

Le violon d'Ingres – portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse by Man Ray

Jacob Riis was a social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City. He is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography

Joe Rosenthal was an American photographer who received the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken on Mount Suribashi, on 23 February 1945

August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time was published in 1929. Sander has been described as ‘the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century’

Charles Sheeler is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century. He focused particularly on architectural subjects

Cindy 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

Julius Shulman was an American architectural photographer best known for his photograph Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre Koenig, Architect. The house is also known as the Stahl House

Edward Steichen was born in Luxembourg. Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen was a photographer for the Conde Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair while also working for many advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson

The Pond-Moonlight was taken in 1904 in Mamaroneck, New York, and features a forest across a pond, with part of the moon appearing over the horizon in a gap in the trees. The Pond-Moonlight is one of the first colour photographs ever taken

Alfred Stieglitz is known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Many photographs of New York in winter. The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later known as 291) was a tiny fine art photography gallery in New York City created and run by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen from 1905 to 1917. The gallery helped bring art photography, initially that in the Pictorialist style, to the same level of appreciation in America as painting and sculpture

Mario Testino is a Peruvian fashion photographer. Celebrity subjects have most famously included Diana, Princess of Wales and her sons

Spencer Tunick is an American photographer best known for organizing large-scale nude shoots. Since 1994 he has photographed over 75 human installations around the world

Jerry Uelsmann was the forerunner of photomontage in the 20th century in America

Nick Ut won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for The Terror of War, depicting children in flight from a napalm bombing. His best-known photo features a naked girl running toward the camera from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on North Vietnamese invaders

Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer, best known for his photographs of Vancouver

Photographic processes

Heliography is the photographic process invented by Joseph Niepce around 1822, which he used to make the earliest known permanent photograph from nature, View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1826). The process used bitumen, as a coating on glass or metal, which hardened in relation to exposure to light. When the plate was washed with oil of lavender, only the hardened image area remained

Daguerreotype was the first successful photographic process. It was developed by Louis Daguerre together with Joseph Niepce. The image in a Daguerreotype is formed by the amalgam, or combination, of mercury and silver. Invented in 1839

Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide

Cyanotype – an old monochrome photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Led to the blueprint process

Time lapse photography – taking a series of pictures of the same basic scene at regular, timed intervals from the same viewpoint

Chronophotography – an antique photographic technique from the Victorian era which captures movement in several frames of print. Pioneered by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge

Panning – the rotation in a horizontal plane of a still camera or video camera. Panning a camera results in a motion similar to that of someone shaking their head from side to side

Photogram – a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The technique is sometimes called cameraless photography. It was used by Man Ray in his exploration of rayographs

Cameras

The first Leica prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, Wetzlar, in 1913. Intended as a compact camera for landscape photography, the Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera, using standard cinema 35 mm film

Hasselblad is a Swedish company best known for the medium-format cameras it has produced since World War II. Perhaps the most famous use of the Hasselblad camera was during the Apollo program missions when humans first landed on the Moon

Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie was introduced in 1900

Polaroid Corporation pioneered (and patented) consumer friendly instant cameras and film. The invention of commercially viable instant cameras which were easy to use is generally credited to Edwin Land, who unveiled the first commercial instant camera in 1948

Although Kodak developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak's photographic film business

Most expensive photographs (August 2022)

1 – Man Ray, Le Violon d'Ingres (1924) $12,400,000

2 – Andreas Gursky, Rhein II (1999), $4,338,500

3 – Richard Prince, Spiritual America (1981), $3,971,000

4 – Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96 (1981), $3,890,500

5 – Cindy Sherman, Untitled #93 (1981), $3,861,000

6 – Justin Aversano, Twin Flames #49 NFT (2021), $3,781,159

7 – Gilbert & George, To Her Majesty (1973), $3,765,276