Items15The creator’s order
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André KertészThe lesson: notice the shapes before you notice the subject. Kertész arrived in Paris in 1925 speaking no French and made plain scenes into quiet arrangements of line, shadow and reflection, often with a light Leica that let him blend in.
Start with Meudon (1928), where a train and a lone walker…0 - 2
Henri Cartier-BressonBorn Aug 22, 1908The lesson: timing. Cartier-Bresson found the Leica in 1932 and used it for the rest of his career, and his first book, Images à la Sauvette (1952), reached English readers as The Decisive Moment, a phrase that still names the whole idea of catching the instant when everything in the frame falls…0 - 3
Robert FrankBorn Nov 9, 1924The lesson: editing is half the work. After a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank spent two years crossing the United States and shot more than 28,000 pictures, yet The Americans holds just 83 of them. The book came out in Paris in 1958 and from Grove Press in New York a year later.
Read it in…0 - 4
Vivian MaierBorn Feb 1, 1926The lesson: you do not need permission or an audience to keep shooting. Maier bought a Rolleiflex in 1952, worked as a nanny and caregiver for most of her life, mostly in Chicago after 1956, and left more than 100,000 negatives that almost nobody saw until they surfaced at a thrift auction house in…0 - 5
Garry WinograndThe lesson: shoot a lot and stop judging in advance. Winogrand worked close with a wide 28mm lens, tilted his horizons without apology and is remembered for saying he photographed to find out what something would look like photographed. When he died in 1984 he left roughly 2,500 rolls of film he…0 - 6
Elliott ErwittThe lesson: look for the joke. Erwitt joined Magnum in 1953 and became known for gentle irony, the small coincidence or mismatch that makes a stranger smile, and four of his books are given over entirely to dogs.
Dogs are a smart first subject for a nervous beginner, and he said as much: they do…0 - 7
Lee FriedlanderBorn Jul 14, 1934The lesson: let the clutter in, then organize it. Friedlander fills his frames with poles, signs, store windows and his own shadow, and somehow every piece has a job. His book Self Portrait (1970) turns that shadow and his reflection into a running joke across about fifty pictures, and The American…0 - 8
Josef KoudelkaBorn Jan 10, 1938The lesson: give a subject years, not an afternoon. Koudelka photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 and published those pictures under the initials P.P., for Prague Photographer, to protect his family from reprisals. His first book, Gypsies, came out in 1975 after years of living for…0 - 9
Joel MeyerowitzThe lesson: take color seriously. Meyerowitz quit his job in 1962 to become a photographer after being inspired by Robert Frank, and he was among the pioneers of color film in the 1960s. In 1972 he switched for good to large-format color, which led to his first book, Cape Light, made on Cape…0 - 10
Daidō MoriyamaBorn Oct 10, 1938The lesson: grain, blur and instinct are allowed. Moriyama worked with the short-lived Provoke magazine in the late 1960s, whose look became known as are, bure, boke, usually translated as grainy, blurry and out of focus, a deliberate break from neat, dependable photojournalism.
His best-known…0
