Seven Great Photographers You Should Know

With nearly forty books currently in print, our Photofile series provides a digestible introduction to the world’s greatest photographers. These pocket-sized monographs present key images from each artist’s body of work, capturing their style and breadth in a stylish and collectable format.

The series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography, New York. For photographers and enthusiasts alike, the Photofile series highlights inspiring and emotive images from artists who have left a lasting impact on the world of photography.

1. Gordon Parks
‘When I felt I couldn’t say what was in me, I turned to photography. I learned that it would enable me to show what was right and wrong about America, the world and life. I wanted my children and my children’s children to be able to look at my pictures and know what my world was like.’

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) has long been considered a pioneering figure in 20th-century photography. Best known for documenting evocative scenes of poverty, race relations and civil rights, Parks was also well versed in fashion photography and portraiture, photographing some of the most prominent figures of his era including Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, Miles Davis and Muhammed Ali.

While Parks regularly worked for Vogue and Glamour magazines, it was his documentary photography that made waves. During his time as a staff photographer at Life Magazine, he contributed numerous photo essays exploring the Black experience in America, from the life of a 15-year-old gang leader to a poor family in Alabama. In his introduction to Gordon Parks (Photofile), Paul Roth explains what it was about Parks’ images that made them so moving:

‘While his eye for composition was distinctive, and his images possessed a striking emotional honesty, it was Parks’s access to this previously unobserved world that made the story so astonishing.’

2. Helen Levitt
Brooklyn born photographer Helen Levitt (1913–2009) is best known for her urban street photography. Early in her career, Levitt was an assistant to Walker Evans and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson but went on to establish her own recognizable style of imagery.

A life-long resident of New York, Levitt often trained her lens on working class neighbourhoods across the boroughs, capturing children as they played in the streets and interacted with the world around them. Her only trip abroad took Levitt to Mexico City, where her fascination with urban streets as impromptu and unofficial playgrounds continued, documenting the disparity between social classes in black and white.

Given her chosen subject matter, Levitt’s work is often described as ‘lyrical’, and ‘emphasized the enigmatic and humorous nature of the interactions that make up the everyday fabric of social life,’ as Jean- François Chevrier – author of Helen Levitt (Photofile) – writes.

3. Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was both a painter and photographer; more remarkable still is that most of his work was unseen during his lifetime.

Born in Pittsburgh, Leiter moved to New York City in the 1950s to become a painter but it was photography that became his living, shooting fashion spreads for the likes of Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire magazines. In his personal work, he often turned his lens toward the streets of New York, capturing the city and its inhabitants in unconventional ways.

It was Leiter’s ability to consider ‘what lies underneath, is off to the side or gets in the way of his nominal subject. He juggles foreground and background indiscriminately, such that they trade places – to surprising effect,’ writes Max Kozloff, in the introduction to Saul Leiter (Photofile).

Whether shooting in black and white or in colour, Leiter was a master at discovering beauty in the most ordinary places and is celebrated for his evocative photographs of New York.

4. Daido Moriyama
‘Going out into the street with my camera in my hand, I can find as many subjects as there are grains of sand on a beach. Tokyo is an ocean where a forest of subjects is waiting to be photographed. I don’t have any choice: I just have to jump in and give up trying to control things, like Pavlov’s dog.’

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, with his fiercely contrasted images of Tokyo. Moriyama frequently walked the streets with his camera in tow, taking photographs as he immersed himself in the life of the city, day and night. His whole photographic oeuvre examines the contrasts between light and shadow, black and white.

As Gabriel Bauret explains in his introduction to Daido Moriyama (Photofile), he ‘likes to photograph things in motion and opts for deliberately blurred effects and graininess; he is not interested in depth of field or details. […] The underlying idea is that in certain places, everything has the potential to be an image, and also that the creative act does not stop at the edge of the photograph but continues elsewhere.’

5. Claude Cahun
‘The happiest moments of my life? Dreams. Imagining that I’m somebody else. Acting out my favourite role.’

Claude Cahun (1894–1954) was a pioneering figure in the aesthetics of modernity who never stopped crossing boundaries of gender and genre. Perhaps best known in her lifetime as a writer, Cahun built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after her death.

In the introduction to Claude Cahun (Photofile), François Leperlier makes clear that Cahun ‘uses photography as part of an intimate, existential and poetic experiment, whose motifs are explained at length in her literary work, and which had the goal of destabilizing the perception of reality and emphasizing the power of the imagination.’ Self-portraiture was the genre Cahun explored most widely for almost forty years, building a body of work in which she used costumes, makeup and technical effects to tackle themes of identity and self-representation.

6. James Barnor
‘I had two lives. My first life, the life of the studio, where you stay still, and my second life, the life of the outside world, with the camera hanging from a strap, where you […] never stop moving. To do that, you have to know the people who count, open your eyes and ears to recognise what is going on.’

From the earliest days of his career, Ghanian photographer James Barnor combined different approaches to photography, utilising the skills he picked up from the circle of photographers he was surrounded by. Though he only received his first camera as a gift in 1947, by 1953, he had opened his own studio. The Ever Young studio would go on to become a community hub that affected the style of his portraiture, evoking the more casual and relaxed atmosphere of the studio.

While he had some training and often found visual references in photography books and magazines, Barnor decided to move to the UK to continue his practical education, studying at Medway College of Art for three years and adding new photography techniques and skills to his repertoire. He continued to work in the UK, blending his street photography and portraiture styles in a way that allowed him to represent the African diaspora in the UK in a lively and joyful style.

7. Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was a documentary photographer who took one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression: Migrant Mother.

Lange began her career as a portrait photographer, running her own studio in San Francisco, but her most recognizable works came in the 1930s in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. She began photographing unemployed men around San Francisco, documenting their hardships as unemployment skyrocketed. From there, she took part in a major photography project with the Farm Security Administration, to show the living and working conditions of rural communities across the country. It was during this project that she captured Migrant Mother.

In the words of the International Center of Photography, it was Lange’s ‘respectful empathy for people and her keen ability to communicate the essential elements of the situations she photographed,’ that made her work so impactful and one of the most important documentary photographers in recent history.

Discover the full Photofile series