If you use Instagram regularly, you have surely noticed certain photography trends, especially in portraiture and landscape photography. Many of them aren't brand new trends – they have stuck around for a few years and they are still going strong.

You don't have to follow these trends if you have great ideas on your own, but it's still useful to know what's popular. If you admire some of these trends and want to capture similar photographs, following popular accounts and hashtags can be beneficial. Other people's work can be a great source of inspiration and reignite your creative fire. 

Read on to learn more about the most popular current trends on Instagram!

In case you don't know, body positivity is a social movement created to empower women and men in different shapes and sizes. Body positivity advocates the acceptance of all bodies regardless of physical ability, gender, race, or appearance.

This movement has been quite controversial but it's still going strong on Instagram. It doesn't feature only plus-sized models but also average bodies with physical imperfections such as stretch marks and cellulite. Unedited images of fitness models are very popular within this movement because they help people to form realistic expectations when it comes to appearance.

2. No Makeup Shots (#nomakeup)

This type of portraiture is getting more and more popular on Instagram and it exists as a counterbalance to apps such as FaceTune and various beauty filters. Many young people are proud of this no-filter approach, as they want to learn to accept their imperfections and share them with others.

The function of such shots is similar to body positive images, but it focuses on facial features and embracing the diversity in terms of skin, eyes, nose, lips, and so on. Shots of various celebrities and influencers without makeup and before plastic surgeries are highly sought after.

Minimal landscapes, portraits, and product images with a super clean look are extremely popular on Instagram. It makes sense because the less-is-more approach is common in architecture and interior design too. Instead of bright and colorful images, you’re more likely to find a monochrome, neutral aesthetic in many realms of art and design nowadays.

Minimalism combines well with black and white photography. If you appreciate this kind of aesthetic, feel free to check out our article on minimal photography.

4. Drone Photography (#drone)

Drone photography is getting more affordable these days and many Instagram influencers want to surprise their followers with a different perspective on ordinary things.

Using a drone will allow you to capture everyday life for what it is but with an exciting twist! Photos of traffic jams, residential areas, and people resting in parks feel almost hypnotizing from a bird’s eye view because it's an unfamiliar perspective for us.

If you want to learn the basics of drone photography, check out this useful guide.

5. Film Photography (#film)

I'm sure you already know that film photography is having a big comeback. Interest in film photography has been growing over the last five years and it is not a short temporary fad. There are zillions of accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube dedicated solely to film photography.

There is some magic in taking photos you can’t post-process on your phone right away and many young artists (who didn't have any previous experience with film photography) appreciate this kind of magic and are happy to learn photography the old-school way.

If you want to publish your film photographs on Instagram, you can easily digitize your photos. Of course, you can also apply film filters but that would count as cheating!

To learn more about film photography, check out this article.

6. Neon Lights (#neon)

Neon lights are part of the cyberpunk aesthetic that is popular thanks to various games, animations, and movies. Many photographers, designers, and illustrators are enriching their projects with neon colors and futuristic skyscrapers, which can add dystopian vibes to portraits and landscapes.

What's great about neon lights is that you can find them basically anywhere if you live in an urban area. Consult the color wheel if you want to take great portraits illuminated with neon lights!

7. Direct Flash (#flash)

Quite literally, direct flash portraiture is the style of taking your light source (usually an on-camera flash) and placing it right in front of your model. The result is a very harsh light that many photographers find unpleasant. However, this style is incredibly popular with mainstream fashion photographers and editors and you can see it on Instagram a lot.

If you want to experiment with this style, it's usually good to combine it with simple plain backgrounds. Check out the portfolio of fashion photography Terry Richardson who made many cult portraits using this method.

8. Messy Still Life (#stilllife)

Even though minimalism rules the world of still life, there is also the opposite approach which is getting more exposure these days. Chaotic still life and product photography might sound like a bad idea, but if you can arrange many objects and colors in a visually pleasing way, you can create something opulent or playful and comical. It all depends on the message you want to convey.

To learn the basics of still life photography, check out this great article.

9. Throwback Selfie (#tbt)

It perfectly makes sense that throwback selfies (#tb or #tbt) were extremely common on Instagram in 2020. Because of the pandemic, we didn't enjoy this year and many of us resorted to recalling more cheerful times by reposting old photos, mostly taken somewhere outdoors.

Let's hope that 2021 will be much more enjoyable for us photographers and everyone else too!

Further Reading:

One photographer sent out a tweet that possibly changed his life. If so, this story could demonstrate to us all the power of social media.

So what’s going on here?

Basically, photographer Malcolm Manning, Twitter handle @MalcomMal_, sent out a tweet that read “Hello, I am a 23 year old photographer from Newark, New Jersey eager to create. You never know, 1 retweet could help me grow my business or secure my next client – much love.”

And none other than Oprah Winfrey replied to his tweet, writing: “I’m relaunching @OprahMagazine’s website in 2021. How about you come shoot one of our stories?”

As you can imagine, such an offer came as a complete shock to Manning and gave him a much-needed opportunity.

“I was in complete shock…What do you say to Oprah?” PetaPixel quotes the photographer.

“Wow Ms. Winfrey! Thank You so much for this opportunity. I am humbled and it would be an honor to create for you,” he tweeted back.

PetaPixel also reports that Fox 10 Phoenix says this is one of many acts of kindness performed by Winfrey over the Christmas holiday. Apparently, the megastar has surprised more than a few Twitter members with offers.

Of course, not all of us will be as lucky as Malcolm Manning, but this story does illustrate the importance of having a social media presence of some kind. You never know how will read your tweets or posts and subsequently offer you work.

What do you think of Oprah’s move to give this photographer a job? Let us know your thoughts on this story in the comments.

Don’t forget to check out our other photography news at this link right here.

[PetaPixel]

Photography has the power of brightening up our lives; and what a great thing it is to start our days by checking out some beautiful images in the comfort of our homes! Here is the weekly wrap-up from Light Stalking – where you'll find finely curated photos from the general chit chat, as some creative images from Tersha's latest photography challenge on Red! And as you've already guessed, we'll be mentioning some worth-seeing shots from the Feedback Forum too!

Photo Of The Week – December 27th, 2020

Words by Jasenka Grujin

This time POTW goes to @diripics and his tea candle.

I like the simplicity of this image and the fact that dusty whitish outline feels so ancient, as if no one has touched this candle for a long time. I have a weak spot for nostalgic vibes.

I also rarely see red and brown together (red and black is much more common in photography and design), so that’s another great thing about this shot.

Congrats, Graham.

What Are Our Members Up To?

Pour some coffee and enjoy our favourite shots from Challenge 518th!

Photo by Rob Eyers

Photo by Bucweet

Photo by Pat Garrett

Photo by Brenda

Photo by Wendy P

Photo by Jasenka Grujin

Photo by Holly K

What You Shouldn't Be Missing from The Light Stalking Community

Amidst the holidays, here are some Christmas-related photographs shared by our community!

Photo by Tersha

Photo by Rob Eyers

Photo by Frogdaily

Photo by Charmaine Joubert

Photo by Jasenka Grujin

Photo by Dave Watkins

And don't forget to welcome our freshest forum members too!

We'd Love To Hear Your Thoughts

Also, our Feedback Forum received some nice photographs and is clear that some of you have started building a solid photography style. This is the right place for all those people that want to grow fast as photographers. This is possible thanks to valuable and positive feedback, which is perhaps the best way in which someone can hack the learning curve in photography.

Here you'll get your work critiqued by plenty of well-intended people, but you'll also have the chance of critiquing your peers. We truly believe in the power of criticism and feedback.

Many of our members have nurtured their own photographic knowledge by giving out elaborate critiques that go way beyond simple emoji based reactions or “nice shot” comments. Here are some of the most interesting shots shared during the last week:

The Shark Tank is a great place to learn and to discuss, so please read the instructions in order to get a better critique experience. Share your comments, opinions and doubts on any or all of the images above. We also will be delighted to see some of your own images. Don't be shy, critiques are given to photographs and not photographers. We'll be more than pleased to help you out; after all, we all are in love with photography. Also, don't forget to participate in our 519th challenge on Contrasting Colours!

There’s a bit of a controversy going on between a massive and well-known university in the United States and their student journalists.

Namely, it seems that Penn State wants its student volunteers that work for the school’s newspaper to sign over any rights they might have to their work. This includes the photographers that work for the paper.

As you can imagine, more than a few people in our community are interested in this story and for good reason. After all, you know how much we love to follow court cases and anything and everything involving copyrights on photos.

But it isn’t just the contract that is getting attention. Delivered to the students on November 18, 2020, they had two days to agree to its terms and sign or else they would not be part of the newspaper in 2021, PetaPixel reports.

The contract reads in part: “I hereby authorize Collegian, Inc. and its officers, agents, and employees, to photograph, record, film, or videotape me or to use media that I submit. …I hereby assign to Collegian, Inc. all rights, title, and interest, including copyright, in and to any and all such photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, or videos, and I hereby irrevocably authorize Collegian Inc., its officers, agents, and employees, without limitation, to reproduce, copy, sell, exhibit, publish or distribute in any medium now known or later developed, any and all such any and all such photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, or videos in perpetuity for the purposes expressed above.”

You can read the full contract here.

PetaPixel reports that the students then contacted the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) as well as the Student Press Law Center, both of which advised them to not sign the contract. After some back and forth, a second contract was delivered to be completed by December 23rd. Yet this iteration also contained language that didn’t exactly return the copyright to the students that produced the work yet retained it then released it to the public domain after 15 months except for in commercial usage licensing rights which will be retained by Collegian, Inc.

So far no one has signed a contract and PetaPixel reports that Collegian, Inc., isn’t really interested in negotiations moving forward. You can read the article here as well as the student’s second response at this link.

What do you think of Penn State’s contract for student photojournalists? Do they have a right to their work or does it belong to the institution for which they are “volunteers?” Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Don’t forget to check out our photography news on Light Stalking at this link right here.

[PetaPixel]

Drones used to be a regular fixture in our headlines and not for very positive reasons.

If you will recall a couple of holiday seasons back, drones shut down air traffic at Gatwick, one of the United Kingdom’s busiest airports, and that pretty much served as the capstone of a year filled with random goings-on with drones and careless pilots doing things they shouldn’t.

Naturally, you guys told us in the comments then that more regulations would be coming around the bend since no one can seem to play nice and you were right.

The Federal Aviation Administration in the United States just released its rules for drone pilots and operators and it probably represents one of the largest moves in that country to regulate the heretofore lightly drone aviation sector. Among the requirements introduced are a new remote ID system as well as a clearer picture of when drones can operate at night and under what conditions.

As PetaPixel describes, the remote ID requirement, one long expected, is sort of like a digital license plate for your drone. Its purpose, as outlined by the FAA, is “to address aviation safety and security issues regarding Unmanned Aircraft (UA) operations in the National Airspace System, and is an essential building block towards safely allowing more complex UA operations.”

In terms of nighttime flying, the FAA rules stipulate a new training course for drone pilots to take in order to fulfill their requirements in this area. They’ve also described a variety of conditions and what is and is not permissible in their new guidelines. One thing that has not changed is the very tough restrictions on flying drones near lanes of traffic and moving vehicles. That will remain something that is very limited if ever allowed.

You can check out the new regulations here for yourself.

What do you think of the FAA’s rules for drone operators? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Don’t forget to check out our other photography news at this link right here.

[PetaPixel]

When you think about famous photographers, what names pop into your mind first? Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray? All of these names belong to very important characters who left an indelible mark on the world of photography. These photographers are very different in terms of their favorite genres and subjects – what connects them is the fact that they are still well known around the world and many professional photographers and photography enthusiasts look up to their images.

List Of Famous Photographers

We'll start with Henri Cartier Bresson because he's perhaps the best known famous photographer. We will include portrait photographers and documentary photographers as well as many important names in street photography, fashion, and landscape photography.

Henri Cartier Bresson

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye, and the heart. It's a way of life.”

— Henri Cartier Bresson—

This French photographer is a true king of street photography. He made everyday life scenes memorable thanks to his amazing street photographs.

Cartier Bresson bore witness to world-changing events from Spain’s Civil War to the death of Gandhi while capturing ‘decisive moments’ in the lives of ordinary people. Born in 1908 in a village outside Paris, Henri Cartier Bresson is considered one of the great 20th-century photographers. He was meant to inherit the family textile business, but the budding artist had other ideas. Due to a lack of access to painting materials, he was prompted to start taking photographs of the people he met. 

In order to achieve the candid shots for which he is known, Cartier Bresson blended in with his surroundings, never used a flash, and covered his chrome Leica camera with black tape to make it less conspicuous. 

When he died in 2004, he left behind half a million negatives taken over the course of 50 years in more than 40 countries. Cartier-Bresson’s most-loved works were snapshots of ordinary people, doing ordinary things, going about their daily lives.

The expression ”decisive moment” is still used very often in photography.

Ansel Adams

“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” 

—Ansel Adams—

Ansel Adams was born in 1902 and was known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He is considered the most important landscape photographer and environmentalist of the 20th century. He depicted the American West in a majestic way.

Adams was fourteen when he visited Yosemite National Park for the first time with his family. He later described his first view, “The splendor of Yosemite burst upon me and it was glorious. Rainbows of living color, flashes of lightning, and rolls of thunder. One wonder after another descended. There was light everywhere, and a new era began for me.” 

During that stay, his father gave him his first camera, an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera, and his life as a photographer began. Later on, he often used large-format cameras.

Ansel Adams had a keen understanding of the specific quality of the light that fell on a specific place at a specific moment, which led him to develop the zone system, which determined the relationship of exposure, development, and the resulting densities of the photographic negative. The system's purpose was not technical but rather expressive, and he used it to visualize a finished photograph before the exposure was made. 

Most of Adams’s great work as a photographer was completed by 1950. In his later life, he spent most of his energy as a photographer reinterpreting his earlier work. 

Ansel Adams is still one of the best-known landscape photographers.

Robert Capa

“If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.”

—Robert Capa—

Robert Capa was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist and is considered to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.

In World War II he covered much of the heaviest fighting in Africa, Sicily, and Italy for Life magazine. His photographs of the Normandy Invasion became some of the most memorable of World War II. 

Robert Capa is known for redefining wartime photojournalism and street images. He was an excellent documentary photographer too. His work came from the trenches as opposed to the more arms-length perspective that was the precedent. 

In 1954 he went on assignment for Life magazine to Southeast Asia where he accompanied a French regiment. While passing through a dangerous area under fire, the forty-year-old Capa left his jeep to photograph the advancing enemy when he stepped on a landmine and was killed.

Robert Capa was one of the most famous war photographers of all time.

Dorothea Lange

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”

—Dorothea Lange—

Dorothea Lange was born at the very end of the 19th century to educated and prosperous first-generation German-Americans. She was one of the best of the American documentary photographers who used her art to document the human suffering caused by the 1930’s Great Depression. As she viewed it, photography was not an end in itself, but a means of exploring the world so as to improve it.

Dorothea Lange was comfortable with everyone she encountered, but particularly with the down-and-outers, the silent and invisible population suffering from circumstances beyond their understanding or control. Such people trusted her, and she viewed and exhibited them with compassion and respect. 

Her most famous photograph, a black and white portrait known as the “Migrant Mother”, has been dubbed the “Mona Lisa” of depression-era photography. 

Lange was a cultural commentator who used the camera to accurately record but never interfered with the political happenings of the time.

Her ”Migrant Mother” still remains one of the best-known photographs around the world. Portrait photography wouldn't be the same without Lange and her work.

Edward Weston

“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, because the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.”

—Edward Weston—

Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1886. His father, an obstetrician, bought him his first camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2, for his 16th birthday. The gift came with a note that included the helpful advice; “Don’t be too far from the object you wish to take, or it’ll be very small’. 

Weston became a major American photographer and best known for his carefully composed, sharply focused, and full tonal scale images of sand dunes, landscapes, vegetables, rock forms, and semi-abstract nudes, which produced some of the world-famous, most iconic images. In his work, he helped people see photography as an art. 

Weston’s most celebrated images were of sand dunes, with their near-black forms he achieved in some parts through shadow, and the near-white dunes he achieved in others through brilliant light, causing the images to verge on abstraction. 

The type of photographs in which Weston specialized is called “straight photography,” where no unusual effects are done to change the image of the photograph. His work is stunning in its simplicity.

Steve McCurry

“If you want to be a photographer first leave home.”

 —Steve McCurry—

Steve McCurry is an American photographer, born in Philadelphia in 1950, and for more than thirty years has been one of the most prolific documentary/travel photographers in the world. He is recognized universally as one of today's finest image-makers. His ”Afghan girl” is certainly one of the most influential portrait images.

He is a master of working with color, and the way he contrasts the background and foreground colors is something that takes photographic eye years of practice. That's evident in his ”Afghan girl” too.

By using color repetition McCurry has developed a style that's universally recognizable. 

His composition of lines and surfaces is one of the vital components that makes his photos look unique, and when people look at his work, their eyes circle around the image, leading them to study his pictures for a long time. 

The ”unguarded moment” is a term that McCurry coined and uses to describe the perfect moment to take a photograph, that time when people are at their most unselfconscious, that split second where they seem to be oblivious to the rest of the world. 

Richard Avedon

“I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish I could work with my eyes alone.”

—Richard Avedon—

Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923 and is considered to be one of the more influential photographers of the late 20th century, and the number one portrait and fashion photographer. He is best known for his simple, evocative portraits of everyone from movie stars to politicians to impoverished coal miners. 

The Avedon style was stark, in-your-face, and dramatic, which was a reflection of his own insecurities and fear of death.

His portraits have one thing in common; they are simple. “By eliminating distractions,” he said, “You're always focused on the right thing – the subject.”

He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.

His brand-defining work and long associations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies resulted in some of the best-known advertising campaigns in American history. 

When he died in 2004, his obituary stated that he helped define the image, style, and culture of America for the last 50 years.

Man Ray

“I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.”

—Man Ray—

Man Ray was born in 1890 as Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, to Russian Jewish immigrants. He was an American photographer, sculptor, painter, and filmmaker, famous for his camera-less technique of photography dubbed as “rayographs.“ He was a deeply innovative artist who fervently wanted to revolutionize art. 

He was interested in obtaining unusual effects and created Rayographs, which were made without the use of a camera, by directly exposing them to light sensitized papers on which various objects were placed. 

Although Ray worked with various artistic mediums, he’s most well-known for his photographic innovation known as solarization, a process of recording an image on a negative which reverses the shadows and light exposure. 

Although born in the United States, he spent the majority of his career in France, where he played an integral part in both the Dada and Surrealist movements. The Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society and expressed nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.

Man Ray created some of the most famous works of the period and left a legacy stretching far beyond the years he was active.

Alfred Stieglitz

“Photography is my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.”

 – Alfred Stieglitz—

Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1st, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey to a family of German-Jewish Immigrants. At 18, he decided to go to Berlin and study mechanical engineering but instead he discovered his passion for photography, which was a new and growing phenomenon in the art community. 

He collected books on the subject and became a self-study. He soon became a leading advocate for the pictorial school of photography. His goal in life was to make photography an accepted art form.

Believing that photography was an art, Alfred Stieglitz studied and practiced it with a passion. He loved talking about photography too and always wanted to spread the word about how great it was and how it was done.

Stieglitz was really big into the idea of “pre-visualization”, meaning, you pre-visualize your photograph in your mind before shooting it. Then after you made a photo of a scene, you would print it how you pre-visualized it in your mind.

Stieglitz put his entire life on the line to help promote photography. Modern photography might not be around if it weren’t for him. 

Robert Frank

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

—Robert Frank—

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924. He traveled the world before he finally settled in New York in 1947. His first photographic work was in fashion photography with Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

In 1955, he set out to document America as he saw it. His cross-country road trip to capture America became one of the most influential and repeated road trips in photographic history. 

In each place he stopped, he tried to get a sense for the flavor of peoples’ lives by visiting ordinary places—the local Woolworth’s, coffee shops, cemeteries, parks, banks, hotels, and post offices, which provided him with opportunities to observe a range of Americans without drawing too much attention to himself.

He became best known for his 1959 book “The Americans”, a collection of black-and-white photographs that were dark, grainy, and free from nostalgia.

He became one of the most influential photographers of the mid-20th century, because of his ironic renderings of American life.

Robert Frank, very simply, changed the way the world looks at America. 

Robert Doisneau

“If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.”

—Robert Doisneau—

Robert Doisneau was born in 1912, in Gentilly, France, and was a photographer noted for his poetic way of capturing life in his native city Paris. His photographs often draw comparisons to Monet, Renoir, and Manet, who immortalized the city through their art almost 100 years earlier. 

He first worked as an advertising photographer and then as an industrial photographer, and then did advertising and magazine work, including fashion photography for Vogue Magazine. 

“My photographs are completely subjective,” he once said. “They grasp that ‘unevenness' that goes against the order of things. They show the world as I would like it to be.”

Doisneau is well known for his ability to comment on society and individuals through photographic nuance and understatement. 

 He died at the age of 81, leaving behind 450,000 negatives and over 20 books that reflected his enduring pursuit of everyday life.

Annie Leibovitz

“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.”

– Annie Leibovitz—

American photographer Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut. She is renowned for her dramatic, quirky, and iconic portraits of a great variety of celebrities. Her signature style is a crisp and well-lighted image.

In 1967, while still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, she was given her first commercial assignment by Rolling Stone Magazine to photograph John Lennon. Three years later, Leibovitz became the publication’s chief photographer, directing her energies toward a unique presentation of the major personalities of contemporary rock music.  She stayed there at the Rolling Stone for a decade. 

In 1983 she joined the staff of Vanity Fair, which broadened her pool of subjects to include film stars, athletes, and political figures.  

She began work as an advertising photographer in 1986, gaining such clients as Honda, American Express, and the Gap. Her commercial images were dramatic and complexly staged, rather than casual.

Annie Leibovitz continues to shoot magazine covers and currently tours giving lectures on her long career in journalism and the arts. 

Diane Arbus

“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”

— Diane Arbus—

Arbus was born on March 14, 1923, in New York City. She was one of the most distinctive photographers of the 20th century, known for her eerie portraits and off-beat subjects. Her photographs were chillingly provocative pictures of crossdressers, prostitutes, sad and lonely children, and dwarfs who stared blankly into her camera, looking somewhat startled. She wanted to photograph ugliness and explore worlds other photographers shunned. She created images that forced us to glare at them while taunting us to look away.

Arbus found success with fashion work but soon branched out to shooting raw, and unusual images of the people she saw while living in New York. She realized that no photograph is truly objective and that your photographs are more of a reflection of yourself than the subject. She was one of the first photographers with this approach.

After years of depression, she committed suicide in her New York City apartment on July 26, 1971. 

Cindy Sherman

“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.”

—Cindy Sherman—

Cindy Sherman was a famous photographer born in 1954 in New Jersey. Her work consists primarily of self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

Through these penetrating photographs of herself masquerading as invented characters, she has become one of the most influential artists of her generation. Although she serves as her own model, her photographs are not self-portraits; rather, they are investigations into our identity in American culture through stereotypes that are deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness.

Her photography work is rooted in transformation, perfectly mastering the art of deception as she immerses herself in a new setting and theme with every shot. 

For more than 40 years, Sherman has appeared in nearly all of her work, but never as herself. With the help of stage make-up, prosthetics, wigs, costumes, and, more recently, digital tools, she has shapeshifted into hundreds of characters, among them to transform herself into a sex kitten, drug addict, terrifying clowns, Renaissance Madonnas, society matrons, aging diva, and even a corpse as well. 

When Sherman is shooting, she’s entirely by herself, acting as photographer, model, make-up artist, hairstylist, and costumer.

Eliot Porter

“Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look at what is there.” 

—Eliot Porter—

Eliot Furness Porter was born in 1901 in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. He was an American photographer noted for his detailed and exquisite color images of birds and landscapes and is one of the rare photographers who mastered both black-and-white and color photography. 

He trained as an engineer at Harvard College, and as a physician at Harvard Medical School, and taught biochemistry at Harvard until 1939 when he gave up medicine to begin using photography to study the deeper mysteries of the outdoors.

He explored new ways of presenting the natural world and his artistic and technical contributions to bird and landscape photography transformed these genres.

He mastered what is known technically as the dye-transfer process, enabling him to make brilliant, full-color enlarged prints from color film exposed inside his camera. 

Imogen Cunningham

“Which of the photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”

—Imogen Cunningham—

Cunningham was born in 1883 in Portland, Oregon. Like many famous photographers, her fascination with the art form began early and she bought her first camera when she was 18 years old. 

Cunningham was not just interested in photography as an art form, she wanted to know the chemistry of photography, and was dedicated to acquiring a full understanding of the science behind her art.

By this point, she had already expressed an interest in photographing people. Indeed, throughout the artist's career, there is an ongoing oscillation between the subject of flowers and plants, and that of people. 

Cunningham has been called the “Grandmother of Photography” for her seminal role in popularizing the medium in its early years and for successfully moving the practice into the realm of fine art. 

Cunningham worked as a photographer almost up to her death in 1976. She was 93 when she passed away in San Francisco. 

Frans Lanting

“It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.”

—Frans Lanting—

Frans Lanting, born in 1951, has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. He is a magician at mixing artificial and natural light and blending himself into the majesty of nature. He has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. 

His influential work appears in books, and magazines, and has been commissioned by the National Geographic Society, where he has served as a photographer-in-residence. 

He has been described as having the mind of a scientist, the heart of a hunter, and the eyes of a poet. Lanting says, “There’s an interaction that goes on between animals and me. If you don’t understand what you are photographing, you are just looking at the surface of things.”

Paul Strand

“If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.”

—Paul Strand—

Paul Strand was a photographer and a filmmaker from the United States. He was born in 1890 in New York City. He began taking photography courses at sixteen. The next year he declared his intention to become “an artist in photography.”

The turning point in Strand’s life came when he uncovered the underlying abilities of the large format cameras that became known as “straight photography.” His photos shifted from soft-focus scenes of the modern NYC scene to lay focus on the expressions of objective existence.

Strand’s eye for people was remarkable. His intimate street portraits, which he shot with a hidden camera lens, are renowned for portraying the alienation of modern life.

Over the course of his career, he proved himself not only an incredible portrait, still life, and abstract photographer, but also a pioneer in the development of photography books.

This New York-born pioneer helped forge photography’s path from documentary to art, and he roamed the planet in his quest to understand places and cultures. 

Strand died in 1976 at the age of 85.

Don McCullin

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

—Don McCullin—

Sir Donald McCullin is a British photojournalist, recognized for his war photography and images of urban strife. He examines the underside of society, depicting the suffering of the poor, the downtrodden, and the underprivileged. 

McCullin has been badly wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. This war photographer has braved bullets and bombs, not only to get the perfect shot but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. 

Sally Mann

“Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.”

—Sally Mann—

Sally Mann was born in 1951, in Lexington, Virginia. In 1983, using her century-old 8 × 10-inch view camera, she shot large-format, black-and-white images of whose powerful images of childhood, sexuality, and death were often deemed controversial.

She has been hailed for her painstaking techniques, which involve mentally sketching each photograph, discarding dozens of shots before extensively laboring in the darkroom to achieve the desired effect. 

In the 1990s, Sally Mann transformed the sentimental family photo album into some discomfiting, divisive, and ultimately unforgettable artwork. For her series called, “Immediate Family,” she shot her three children in vulnerable positions.

She believes the censure of her family photographs provoked many people because they illuminated places most of us prefer to keep comfortably dim. 

In the mid-1990s, Mann began photographing landscapes on wet plate collodion 8×10 inch glass negatives and used the same 100-year-old 8×10 format bellows view camera that she had used for all the previous bodies of work. 

In 2018, Sally Mann exhibited 115 photographs of figure studies, landscapes, and architectural views that explore the themes of memory, desire, death, and the bonds of family, all shot in the American South.

Michael Kenna

“Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.”

—Michael Kenna-

Michael Kenna (British, b.1953) is a photographer who was born in Widnes, England, and is best known for his photographs of black-and-white landscapes that have been described as, “islands of serenity and tranquility in a loud and chaotic world.” 

Kenna often takes photographs at dawn or close to dusk, and has been quoted as saying, “You can't always see what's otherwise noticeable during the day . . . with long exposures, you can photograph what the human eye is incapable of seeing.” 

Kenna has built up a body of work that centers on the representation of a landscape devoid of human figures; yet the imprint of a human presence is there in a strange, ghostly way . . . in the traces humans leave behind. 

He has also done a significant amount of commercial work for companies such as Audi, Rolls Royce, Volvo, Sprint, the Spanish Tourist Board, and Dom Perignon.

Kenna is one of those artists who is fascinated and impassioned by the alchemy of printmaking. For him, a work does not stop at taking a photograph but extends to the perfect match between the image and the print. 

Peter Lindbergh

“Although humans see reality in color, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image's deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.”

—Peter Lindbergh—

Peter Lindbergh, born in 1944, was one of the most influential German fashion photographers and portraitists of the modern era. He pioneered a natural, casual, realistic, unretouched look that starkly contrasted the artificial, heavily made-up, and airbrushed styling prevalent in glossy magazines for much of the 20th century.

An iconic early 90s photographer for Vogue Magazine, while shooting images of Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington, he ushered in the new era for fashion photography and kickstarted the entire supermodel phenomenon. Using black and white photography was the key to creating the supermodel.

Peter Lindbergh’s photography goes beyond his fashion and portrait work, he was also a successful advertising photographer, and when he shot the 2017 Pirelli calendar, he took 37,000 images of 15 subjects in seven days, between Berlin, NYC, Los Angeles, and London.

Lindbergh died unexpectedly on the 4th of September 2019, at the age of 74, after decades of turning the fashion landscape and the definition of beauty upside down with his camera.

Sebastião Salgado

“I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. In a fraction of a second when you freeze reality, what is inside is coming out.”

—Sebastião Salgado—

Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado is a Brazilian photojournalist and documentary photographer whose work powerfully expresses the suffering of the homeless and downtrodden.

He started off as an economist and then turned to photography when he realized that photography had more power than papers to inform people about the world. He discovered photography to be an incredible language that didn’t need any translation because photography could be read in any language. 

He believes the ideology or “style” you have in photography should be less about the camera you shoot with, the subject matter you photograph, or whether your shots are in black and white.

Sebastião Salgado, who is 76 recently wrote a letter to Brazil. He urged the country to save the Amazonian tribes from Covid-19. He warned them that the virus could decimate these indigenous people.

Conclusion

Our list of famous photographers could certainly include more names – it wasn't easy to pick them but we tried to include those with a truly majestic body of work. If there are additional important names that you think we should mention in this list of famous photographers, let us know in the comments below.

Further Reading: