Ten 20th-Century Photographers You Should Know

Photography has become such a pervasive part of life that the average American may encounter 1,000 camera images per day. The medium's innovators influence the way we perceive the world around us.

Arts writer and curator Andy Grundberg identifies ten 20th-century photographers you should get to know--pioneering artists who helped to shape the field of modern photography.

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1. Eugène Atget* (1857-1927)--a French photographer who proved at the beginning of the century that well-made photographs could document city life and be filled with poetry.

2. Alfred Stieglitz* (1864-1946)--an artist and entrepreneur who brought photography into the 20th century by championing new ways of seeing, inspired in part by European modern art.

3. Edward Steichen (1879-1973)--one of the leading advocates for fine-art photography before World War I (1914-1918), he later became a master of magazine portraiture, fashion photography, and advertising imagery.

4. Edward Weston* (1886-1958)--known for his close-ups of vegetables and nudes, he was the purest of the purist photographers who believed that photographs should be direct, sharp, and essential.

5. Man Ray (1890-1976)--an American in Paris during the heyday of surrealism who showed that photography depended not on the camera or even on the lens, but on the imagination of the photographer.

6. Ansel Adams (1902-1984)--who not only captured the grandeur of the American West but also dramatically increased the public's appreciation of the art of modern photography.

7. Walker Evans* (1903-1975)--who documented America during the 1930s much as Atget had done earlier in France, but with a fascination for the details of small-town life.

8. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908- )--who used a small 35-millimeter camera to freeze ballet-like moments in the flux of everyday life.

9. Robert Frank* (1924- )--whose skeptical impressions of life in the United States during the 1950s are collected in The Americans, the most influential photography book of the 20th century.

10. Cindy Sherman* (1954- )--whose peculiar brand of self-portraiture brought photography into the forefront of the contemporary art world and the art marketplace in the 1980s.

Andy Grundberg is an independent arts writer, curator, and consultant. He specializes in photography as an art form and as a medium of cultural communication. He also writes about the history of photography as it relates to a broader practice of art (especially in the second half of the 20th century), and about the techniques and technologies of photographing, past and present.

Grundberg served as art critic of the New York Times, with an emphasis on photography, from 1981 to 1991 and as director of The Friends of Photography in San Francisco from 1992 to 1997.