Ten 20th-Century Photographers You Should Know

I've been really into photography lately and my mom sent me this MSN article by Andy Grundberg that I wanted to post. It is a great start to delving into some of the major influentials of modern photography.

~ESC

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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.

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.