The Annenberg Space for Photography – Learn More!

Ansel Adams’ first ambition was to become a concert pianist, and many urged him not to give it up for photography. But he was also an ardent conservationist who fell in love with nature, particularly the Yosemite Sierra, and he ultimately became famous for his signature black-and-white Western landscapes, photographing at different times and seasons to show nature’s changing patterns. In fact, he won three Guggenheim grants to photograph national parks. A believer in “straight photography,” he founded the anti-pictorialist Group f/64 with Edward Weston in 1932. Adams also developed the Zone System, an exposure technique for black-and-white photography that allows photographers to control the tonal range in a negative, giving them more control over finished photographs. While Adams is known for his landscapes, he also did commercial portraits and documentary work.

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron began taking photos merely to pass the time while her husband was away but quickly showed true talent as a portrait photographer. She ran in lofty circles, and her male subjects - Robert Browning, Charles Darwin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson - were some of the great intellectuals and artists of the day. She usually shot against a dark background, draping her models' bodies in dark cloth and carefully lighting them from one side, to dramatic effect. Though Cameron also photographed female celebrities, she tended to select them for their beauty rather than their accomplishments.

One of the most important artistic figures of his time, Edward Steichen was originally a painter who burst onto the international photography scene by creating romantic pictorialist images. His pioneering work-which involved manipulating images and working creatively with filters-helped establish photography as a fine art. After Alfred Stieglitz bought some of his prints, the two became friends and Stieglitz promoted Steichen's work in his publication Camera Work. Steichen joined the advertising industry in 1923. He was instrumental in boosting the number of advertisements that used photography from 15 percent to 80 percent in just a decade. In 1947, Steichen became the director of photography for The Museum of Modern Art, where he organized The Family of Man in 1955, an exhibition of 503 photos that examined the universal themes of life, love, children, and death in 68 countries.

William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the positive/negative photographic process, is known as The Father of Modern Photography. A true Renaissance man who studied the classics at Cambridge, he had a variety of interests—he was a mathematician, a physicist, a botanist, a Biblical scholar, and a transcriber of ancient Syrian and Chaldean texts.

An influential American photographer known for his interpretive eye and  superbly printed photographs, Edward Weston's initial style was soft-focused and pictorialist. However, after joining the London Salon in 1917-and meeting Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand a few years later-he began shooting his subjects in sharp focus and emphasizing more abstract forms. After a stint in Mexico City, he moved to California and began the work for which he would become renowned-landscapes, nudes, and exquisite still lifes of objects such as shells and vegetables. (He eventually burned most of his early negatives, wanting to be remembered for his later work.) Along with Ansel Adams, Weston helped form the famous Group f/64 in 1932, and was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.