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Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus began her photography career in New York in the 1950s, initially working in fashion photography alongside her husband before shifting toward the distinctive documentary-style portrait work that would define her career, often focusing on subjects living on society's margins. Arbus became known for her direct, unflinching square-format portraits of circus performers, people with dwarfism, transgender individuals, and other subjects often excluded from mainstream photography of the era, approaching them with what she described as a mix of curiosity and empathy rather than exploitation. Arbus's 1972 posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, held a year after her death by suicide in 1971, drew record attendance and cemented her critical reputation, and the accompanying monograph became one of the best-selling photography books ever published. Diane Arbus's combination of her unflinching portraits of society's marginalized subjects and the extraordinary posthumous impact of her 1972 MoMA retrospective has made her one of the most influential and often-debated photographers in American history.
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Steve McCurry
Steve McCurry built his career as a photojournalist covering conflicts and cultures around the world for National Geographic and other major publications, becoming particularly known for smuggling his exposed film out of Afghanistan sewn into his clothing while covering the Soviet-Afghan War in the early 1980s. McCurry captured what became one of the most recognized photographs in the history of the medium, "Afghan Girl," a 1984 portrait of a young Afghan refugee with piercing green eyes that ran on the cover of National Geographic in 1985 and remains one of the magazine's most famous images ever published. McCurry's identity of the previously unnamed subject, Sharbat Gula, was confirmed nearly 17 years later in 2002 using iris-recognition technology, a rare instance of a famous anonymous documentary photograph's subject being definitively identified long after the image's initial publication. Steve McCurry's combination of his harrowing Afghan War reporting and his creation of the globally iconic "Afghan Girl" portrait has made him one of the most recognized photojournalists in modern history.
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