Items29The creator’s order
- 1
Julia Margaret CameronBorn 11 Jun 1815Cameron was given a camera at 48 and broke every rule of Victorian studio practice: soft focus, long exposures that let sitters move, heads cropped tight and lit from one side in her converted henhouse on the Isle of Wight. Her portraits of Tennyson, Darwin and Julia Jackson, and her staged…0i - 2
Eugène AtgetBorn 12 Feb 1857For about 30 years Atget hauled a heavy wooden view camera round Paris at dawn, photographing shopfronts, courtyards, staircases, park statues and street trades before the city of old was demolished. The early light, empty streets and reflections in shop windows give his thousands of plates a…0i - 3
August SanderBorn 17 Nov 1876Sander's People of the 20th Century set out to portray every type in German society, from farmers and bricklayers to bankers, artists and the unemployed, each posed frontally, full-length or half-length, in their own clothes and setting, looking straight back at the camera. The plain, even light…0i - 4
Edward WestonBorn 24 Mar 1886Weston photographed peppers, shells, cabbage leaves, nudes and the dunes at Oceano with a large-format camera stopped down for front-to-back sharpness, then made contact prints the same size as the negative so every texture is there to touch with your eyes. Pepper No. 30 of 1930 is famous, but the…0i - 5
Man RayBorn 27 Aug 1890Man Ray treated the darkroom as a place for accidents. His rayographs, made by laying objects directly on photographic paper, and his solarised portraits, with their glowing silver outlines, gave Surrealism its photographic look in 1920s Paris. Solarisation itself was developed with his assistant…0i - 6
BrassaïBorn 9 Sept 1899Brassaï walked Paris at night in the early 1930s, often with the writer Henry Miller, and photographed what the daytime city hid: fog round street lamps, cobbles slick with rain, lovers in cafés, prostitutes, bal-musette dancers and workers on the night shift. Long exposures timed by smoking a…0i - 7
Ansel AdamsBorn 20 Feb 1902Adams's Yosemite and Sierra Nevada landscapes are built on a method as much as a place. With Fred Archer he devised the Zone System, a way of planning exposure and development so that every tone from deep black to bright white is placed exactly, and he compared the negative to a musical score and…0i - 8
Walker EvansBorn 3 Nov 1903Evans called his approach the documentary style: a camera on a tripod, square to a building, a sign or a sharecropper's kitchen, with no dramatic angles and no comment, so that hand-painted shop signs, front porches and Main Streets speak for themselves. His work for the Farm Security…0i - 9
Bill BrandtBorn 2 May 1904Brandt printed dark and hard. Whether showing a coal searcher pushing his bicycle across a slag heap in the north of England, Londoners bedding down in air-raid shelters during the Blitz, as in this 1940 commission for the Ministry of Information, or, after the war, distorted nudes on East Sussex…0 - 10
Henri Cartier-BressonBorn 22 Aug 1908Cartier-Bresson's language is geometry plus timing. Trained as a painter, he would find a strong composition, a staircase, a doorway, a puddle, and wait with his small Leica until a person stepped into exactly the right place, an idea later summed up as the decisive moment. He printed full frame,…0i
