10 Most Influential Photographers Of All Time & Their Works
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” — Dorothea Lange.
Some artists use paint. Others use light. But the most remarkable photographers do something even more profound: they catch time. With a single shutter click, they pull a story out of the noise and pin it in place, forever. These works can be a soldier’s haunted stare, a model framed in soft morning light, or a child clinging to invisible fear. These are echoes, pieces of humanity that outlast the moment.
Come with us to tribute 10 of the most influential photographers of all time and explore the iconic works that earned them a place in history.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams has become synonymous with black-and-white landscapes. Born in 1902 in San Francisco, Adams grew up surrounded by nature. A pivotal trip to Yosemite National Park at the age of 14 sparked a lifelong love for the wilderness, which would later define his artistic career. He originally trained as a classical pianist but eventually chose photography as his life's calling. He brought to photography the same discipline and precision he learned from music.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
Adams is best known for his majestic photographs of the American West, especially of Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, and national parks. His images are scenic, they are deeply expressive, combining grand compositions with a mastery of contrast, texture, and tone. His photograph Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is one of the most celebrated in history, praised for its ethereal quality and perfect timing.
A key part of Adams’ legacy is his development of the Zone System, a method of controlling exposure and development to achieve the desired contrast and tonal range in a photograph. This system became a cornerstone of photographic technique and is still taught today.
He was a perfectionist in the darkroom, often spending hours or days on a single print. His work motto, in his own words, was “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Cartier-Bresson originally trained as a painter. That early foundation in composition and visual balance would shape the way he saw the world for the rest of his life. But it wasn’t until he picked up a small Leica camera in the 1930s that his true vision began to unfold.
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare
Cartier-Bresson had an uncanny ability to press the shutter at the exact second when everything, emotion, geometry, movement, lined up perfectly. He called it “the decisive moment”. One of his most famous images, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, shows a man mid-leap over a puddle. He was frozen in time like a dancer in flight. The subject is completely unposed yet utterly poetic.
Dorothea Lange
Lange’s life was shaped early by adversity. At the age of seven, she contracted polio, leaving her with a permanent limp. Maybe for that reason, Dorothea Lange's works gave voice to the unheard and dignity to the overlooked. She once said, “I believe that what we call beautiful is just what we are tuned to see.” And Lange tuned in to humanity.
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Lange traveled across the United States with her camera, documenting the lives of displaced farmers, migrant workers, and families struggling to survive. Her photos were a witness to resilience during one of the hardest periods in American history.
Migrant Mother
The image that came to define the era was Migrant Mother (1936), a haunting, quietly heroic portrait of a worn but strong woman named Florence Owens Thompson and her children. The woman’s eyes are deep wells of worry, her children leaning on her like roots clinging to a tree. It spoke to millions, and it continues to do so.
Richard Avedon
Avedon began his journey in photography while serving in the Merchant Marines, where he took ID photos. Who could have guessed that the man snapping passport portraits would go on to influence the language of fashion and portrait photography?
In the 1940s, most fashion photography at the time was formal, composed, and distant. Avedon tore up the rulebook. He brought models out of the studio and onto the streets of Paris. He captured them laughing, running, dancing. Models live in motion, in joy, in life. His images for Harper’s Bazaar and later Vogue turned fashion photography into a performance, full of energy.
Carmen
His greatest gift may have been his ability to strip away pretense and look people squarely in the eyes. “My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface.” His portrait work, especially his stark black-and-white series on a white background, was both intimate and relentless. He photographed celebrities, artists, civil rights activists, war protesters, and people from all walks of life.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus began her career in fashion photography alongside her husband, Allan. However, the gloss and glamour of the studio never quite suited her. By the late 1950s, she stepped away from commercial work and began walking the streets of New York with a camera in hand and a deep curiosity in her heart.
Diane Arbus' subjects were sideshow performers, people with disabilities, transgender individuals, nudists, children with haunted eyes. All of them are people most photographers didn’t think to notice, let alone honor. She didn’t photograph them to shock. She photographed them to understand. And in doing so, she forced the viewer to confront their own discomfort.
Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey
Her images are stark, intimate, and often unsettling. But they’re never mocking. Arbus had a gift for seeing the extraordinariness in what the world called “ordinary,” and the vulnerability in what others called “strange.” She once said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” That mystery, that tension, is what makes her work unforgettable.
Sebastião Salgado
Salgado started his career not with a camera but with economics. He studied global development, worked for the International Coffee Organization, and traveled extensively through Africa. It wasn’t until he picked up a camera in his thirties that he found his true language - the language of light, shadow, and soul.
Sebastião Salgado's images are vast, timeless, and achingly human. His black-and-white images capture the beauty and brutality of life with the intimacy of a whisper and the scale of a symphony. He photographed gold miners clawing at the earth in Serra Pelada, famine-stricken families in the Sahel, and indigenous tribes in the Amazon. His work says to us: Look. Don’t turn away.
Through projects Workers (1993), Migrations (2000), and Genesis (2013), Salgado tackled the biggest stories of our age: labor, displacement, environment, survival. Workers is a love letter to the manual laborer. Migrations chronicles the human cost of war, poverty, and ecological collapse. Genesis is a decade-long journey. It was Salgado’s answer to despair: a breathtaking tribute to untouched landscapes, endangered species, and communities still living in harmony with nature.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable chapters of Salgado’s life happened off-camera. After witnessing so much suffering, Salgado fell into depression. The land around his childhood home in Brazil had become barren. However, he didn't surrender to hopelessness. Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, began to replant the forest. Tree by tree, they restored over 2 million trees and helped birth the Instituto Terra reserve.
Robert Capa
The moments Robert Capa captured were usually just a breath away from danger. Robert ran alongside history, camera in hand, heart pounding. Like the best myths, his life was thrilling, romantic, and tragically short.
Capa had a rule: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” He meant it literally and spiritually. His photos weren’t taken from a safe distance. Robert Capa was in the mud, in the smoke, with the soldiers, the refugees, the resistance fighters. He shared their stories by living them.
The Falling Soldier
His big break came during the Spanish Civil War. At that time, he captured what would become one of the most famous war photographs of all time: The Falling Soldier (1936) - a militiaman frozen mid-collapse at the moment of death. It sparked admiration, controversy, and the first signs of the legend that was forming. Was it staged? Was it real? Even today, the photo stirs debate.
Capa didn’t stop there. He covered five wars in total: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. His works are visceral. And that’s what makes them unforgettable.
Robert Capa had dodged death so many times. However, in 1954, while covering the First Indochina War, he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam and was killed instantly. He was just 40 years old.
Cindy Sherman
Raised in suburban Long Island, Cindy Sherman grew up watching TV, flipping through fashion magazines, absorbing a world that told women how to look, act, and belong. Later, with a camera and a daring imagination, she turned all of that on its head.
Untitled Film Stills
Her most famous body of work, "Untitled Film Stills" (1977–1980), feels like a lost archive of mid-century cinema. Black-and-white images of mysterious women: housewives, starlets, wanderers, secretaries, each one a character played by Sherman herself.
At first glance, they seem familiar, like stills from a movie you half-remember. But the more you look, the more you realize: there is no movie. Sherman has created the fantasy from scratch. She is the actress, the director, the costumer, the set designer, the photographer. It’s all an illusion.
Steve McCurry
McCurry studied film, but his heart pulled him toward still images. With a secondhand Nikon and a relentless curiosity, he set off to explore the corners of the world most people never see and came back with images that would change how we see humanity.
Afghan Girl
If you've ever seen the Afghan Girl with those fierce green eyes staring out from beneath a dusty red scarf, you've seen McCurry's work. That photograph alone became a symbol of war, resilience, and haunting beauty.
Steve McCurry shifts global attention to the people often forgotten, refugees, survivors, the everyday and extraordinary. His images are archives of truth, memory, and compassion.
Irving Penn
Born in 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey, Penn originally trained as a painter. He studied under legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, then began his long collaboration with Vogue in the 1940s. He wasn’t loud, he wasn’t showy, but his precision and discipline changed everything around him. Behind his camera was a man who believed that simplicity, done right, could be revolutionary.
Cafe in Lima, Peru 1948
Irving Penn's work elevated commercial photography to fine art. His influence touches everything from advertising to modern fashion campaigns to museum walls.
Conclusion
These ten most influential photographers have helped us understand history, emotion, and the human experience itself. Their works are enduring records of truth, beauty, pain, and progress. Their legacies remain a powerful reminder that photography, at its core, is both an art and a form of witness.