No votes yet — be the first to vote and help rank this list.
- 1Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams began his photography career in the early 20th century, becoming closely associated with California's Yosemite Valley and the broader American West, where his dramatic black-and-white landscape images helped define the visual language of American wilderness photography. Adams co-developed the Zone System alongside fellow photographer Fred Archer in the 1930s and 1940s, a precise technical method for controlling exposure and film development to achieve exact tonal control across an image, which became a foundational technique taught in photography education for decades afterward. Adams was also a committed environmental advocate throughout his career, serving on the board of the Sierra Club for decades, and his photography played a direct role in advocacy efforts that helped establish and protect several U.S. national parks and wilderness areas. Ansel Adams's combination of his technically pioneering Zone System and his photography's direct role in American wilderness conservation advocacy has made him one of the most influential photographers in American history.
Be the first to vote
0 - 2Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz began her career as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, eventually becoming the magazine's chief photographer, and her intimate, often provocative celebrity portraiture helped define the visual identity of the publication during that era. Leibovitz captured one of the most iconic photographs in music history in December 1980, an image of a nude John Lennon curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono, taken just hours before Lennon was murdered, which later ran on the cover of Rolling Stone as a tribute. Leibovitz moved to Vanity Fair in 1983, where she continued producing elaborately staged, conceptual celebrity portraits for decades, and she has been widely credited with elevating celebrity portrait photography into a recognized fine-art form within mainstream magazine publishing. Annie Leibovitz's combination of her iconic final portrait of John Lennon and her decades-long role elevating celebrity photography into a genuine art form has made her one of the most influential portrait photographers in modern history.
Be the first to vote
0 - 3Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon began his career shooting for Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s, pioneering a dynamic new style of fashion photography that captured models in motion and genuine emotional expression rather than the static, formal poses typical of fashion photography at the time. Avedon later became particularly renowned for his stark, minimalist portrait style, typically photographing subjects against a plain white background, a deliberately unadorned approach that stripped away context to focus entirely on the subject's face and expression. Avedon's landmark project "In the American West," a series of large-format portraits of working-class Americans across the western United States published in 1985, marked a significant departure from his celebrity and fashion work and drew both major acclaim and some criticism for its unflinching, unglamorous subjects. Richard Avedon's combination of his revolutionary dynamic fashion photography style and his stark, minimalist portraiture approach has made him one of the most influential photographers in the history of both fashion and fine-art portraiture.
Be the first to vote
0 - 4Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson began his photography career in France in the early 1930s and became widely credited as a pioneering figure of street photography and photojournalism, developing a philosophy he called the "decisive moment," capturing a fleeting instant that reveals the full meaning of a scene. Cartier-Bresson co-founded Magnum Photos in 1947 alongside fellow photographers Robert Capa, David Seymour, and George Rodger, creating one of the first photographer-owned cooperative agencies, which gave photojournalists significantly more control over their own work and its licensing than traditional publication staff positions allowed. Cartier-Bresson favored small, unobtrusive 35mm cameras and natural available light, deliberately avoiding cropping his images after the fact, a strict compositional discipline that reflected his belief that a photograph's composition should be fully resolved at the exact moment the shutter is released. Henri Cartier-Bresson's combination of his foundational "decisive moment" photographic philosophy and his co-founding of the influential Magnum Photos cooperative has made him one of the most historically significant photographers of the 20th century.
Be the first to vote
0 - 5Diane 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.
Be the first to vote
0 - 6Steve 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.
Be the first to vote
0
Related Lists
Suggest an addition
Log in to add a place to this list.
Barks
Log in to bark.