My Influential Photographers

1. Annie Leibovitz

Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, CT. She is a famous American photographer who is most known for her work with portraits, specifically with celebrities. Her photos aim at capturing her subject's personality and inner life and try to bring out their expressive aspects. During her childhood, Leibovitz had lived in many different cities across America, where she had come in contact with many styles of art. Because of this, she initially studied painting at the San Francisco School of Art, hoping to become an art teacher, taking night classes in photography just to experiment. However, just months after she began her studies, one of her photos was used on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, jump-starting her career. She continued to work with Rolling Stone as a commercial photographer and was soon promoted to Chief Photographer, being the first woman to hold that position. After working there for 10 years, she moved to Vanity Fair, where her style changed from intimate scenarios to more staged and bright portraits. She has also contributed tons of work to magazines like Vogue. Her most famous picture to date is of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which is the last captured image of Lennon before his death. Not only has she taken some of the most influential photos of all time, but she also helped prove that there should be no gender gap in photography, becoming the first woman to ever have a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

  

2. Robert Frank

Born on November 9, 1924, in Zürich, Switzerland, Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer who also filmed for many documentaries. He recently died on September 9, 2019, in Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada, and is considered one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. At the age of 22, Frank began his career with fashion photography in Paris for Harper's Bazaar magazine. However, in 1948, he abandoned the career and headed to the United States and Peru where he experimented with more expressive photography. As he traveled around the United States, he took hundreds of everything he saw in the cities. Eventually, in 1959, 83 of these photos, taken with the 35 mm camera, were published in a book called The Americans. This book was a showcase of American Life and is Frank's most notable work to date. Throughout the book, Frank featured strong composition as well as hints of social commentary throughout his pictures. Later, after the release of the book, Frank began to experiment with film-making, eventually focusing on it solely until 1970. The first thing he ever directed was a short-film called Pull My Daisy, and it was a huge success. However, Frank was not able to make it big in film-making as the rest of his films were flops. After that he decided to return to photography and published many books, eventually staging a definitive retrospective of his career in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.