Ansel Adams

(1902-1984)
Environmentalist photographer

"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.  When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."

Ansel Easton Adams was a landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed in exposure, negative development, and printing.

+ Ansel Adams

Antoine d’Agata

(b. 1961)
It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it.

Antoine d'Agata  is a French photographer and film director. His work deals with topics that are often considered taboo, such as addiction, sex, personal obsessions, darkness, and prostitution.

D'Agata is a full member of Magnum Photos. In 2001 he won the Niépce Prize for young photographers.

+ Magnum

Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Lola (1907-93) and Manuel (1902-2002) Alvarez Bravo
"good reputation sleeping"

Lola Álvarez Bravo was the first Mexican female photographer and a key figure in the post-revolution Mexican renaissance. Known for her high level of skill in composition, her works were seen by her peers as fine art.

After completing a traditional education, in 1922 Álvarez enrolled in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she met her lifelong friend, Frida Kahlo. A friendship with another of her childhood friends, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, blossomed into romance around the same time and the two married in 1925.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways.

+ Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Diane Arbus

(1923-1971)
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Arbus worked to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. She worked with a wide range of subjects including members of the LGBTQ+ community, strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families.

+ Diane Arbus Photography

Eugène Atget

(1857-1927)
Collector of the old Paris

Eugène Atget was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization.

+ BNF