WILLIAM WEGMAN William Wegman (born 1943, Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American artist and photographer whose practice across painting, photography, film, video, and writing has made him one of the most inventive and consistently surprising figures in American contemporary art since the 1970s. His early works were conceptual paintings, but by the early 1970s he had…

BASTIAAN WOUDT Bastiaan Woudt (born 1987, Alkmaar, Netherlands) is a Dutch photographer and entrepreneur whose rapid emergence as one of the most significant voices in contemporary fine art photography has been built on a practice of exceptional formal rigour and quiet visual authority. Largely self-taught, Woudt took up photography in 2011, replacing formal training with…

MALICK SIDIBÉ Malick Sidibé (c.1935–2016, born Soloba, French Sudan, now Mali) was a Malian photographer whose black-and-white portraits and reportage from the clubs, parties, and riverbanks of Bamako in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s constitute one of the most joyful and historically significant bodies of photography produced on the African continent in the twentieth century.…

MATTHIAS SCHALLER Matthias Schaller (born 1965, Dillingen an der Donau, Germany) is a German photographer whose conceptually rigorous practice explores the relationship between presence and absence through sustained series of people-less interiors and objects. Educated in cultural anthropology at the Universities of Göttingen, Siena, and Hamburg, Schaller approaches photography as a form of indirect portraiture,…

WILLY RONIS Willy Ronis (1910–2009, born Paris, France) was a French photographer whose lyrical and humanist vision of post-war Paris and Provence placed him alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau as one of the defining voices of twentieth-century French photography. Raised in Montmartre, where his father ran a portrait studio, Ronis came to photography reluctantly,…

NORMAN PARKINSON Norman Parkinson CBE (1913–1990, born London, England) was an English portrait and fashion photographer whose fifty-year career fundamentally transformed British fashion photography and established him as one of the most significant image-makers of the twentieth century. Educated at Westminster School, he began his career in 1931 as an apprentice to the court photographers…

STEVE McCURRY Steve McCurry (born 1950, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American photojournalist and photographer whose four decades of work across the conflict zones, street markets, and landscapes of Asia and the Middle East have produced some of the most widely recognised images in the history of documentary photography. Educated at Pennsylvania State University, he travelled…

DORA MAAR Dora Maar (1907–1997, born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, Tours, France) was a French photographer, painter, and artist whose practice across the 1930s placed her at the intersection of Surrealism, documentary photography, and fine art at one of the most fertile moments in twentieth-century cultural history. Raised partly in Buenos Aires, where her father worked…

HERMAN LEONARD Herman Leonard (1923–2010, born Allentown, Pennsylvania) was an American photographer whose intimate and technically masterful images of jazz musicians in performance and at rest constitute the most significant body of jazz photography of the twentieth century. Upon graduating in 1947, he drove to Ottawa on the chance of working with Yousuf Karsh, the…

MICHAEL KENNA Michael Kenna (born 1953, Widnes, Lancashire, England) is a British photographer whose spare, contemplative black-and-white landscapes have earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive and meditative practitioners of the medium in the contemporary era. Raised in the industrial northwest of England, he studied at the Banbury School of Art and…