MOST IMPACT WOMAN PHOTOGRAPHERS OVER 100 YEARS

On the eve of International Women's Day, we present an overview of the 20 most talented women photographers of the 20th century, who, with their work, made a huge contribution to the development of world photography.

Eva Arnold (1912-2012)
Photographer Eva Arnold

Eva Arnold is an American photographer and photojournalist, the first woman to be a member of Magnum Photos.

Eva became interested in this type of creativity in 1946. She took her first steps in professional photography two years later in Harper’s Bazaar magazine under the direction of its art director Alexey Brodovich. During her creative career, Eva has worked in China, South Africa, Russia, and Afghanistan, filming a variety of subjects, events, and portraits. She gained wide popularity thanks to the shooting of Hollywood stars and political figures: Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Malcolm X, Jacqueline Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, and others. She was especially famous for a series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

In the postwar years, Eva Arnold bore the unofficial title of Grand Dame of Photojournalism. She is considered one of the creators of the "golden age of news photography" associated with publications such as Life and Look. These magazines attracted attention not so much by their texts as by highly artistic pictures taken by such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, and others.

Marilyn Monroe, photo by Eva Arnold

In 1980, the Brooklyn Museum in New York hosted the first solo exhibition of Eva Arnold's photographs taken in China. In 1995 she became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

“Many of my stories were repeated. I was poor, and it was important for me to capture poverty. I was interested in politics, and I tried to understand how it affects our life. Finally, I am a woman, and I wanted to know more about other women, ”- said Arnold in an interview.

Inge Morat (1923-2002)
Photographer Inge Morat

Inge Morath from Austria became a member of Magnum Photos in 1953 and the second female photographer to join this legendary agency.

In total, Inge published about 30 monographs during her life. She worked in different genres, shooting landscapes, portraits, architecture, reporting, but became famous primarily as a street photographer.

Inge became interested in the art of photography in the early 1950s when she worked in post-war Vienna with the photographer Ernst Haas. She was inspired by her own work by viewing the works of the great Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Inge traveled a lot. She traveled to Europe, Africa, the USA, South America, and the Middle East. "It's a strange thing photography ... You just trust your eye, but you can't help but bare your soul," she once said.

Photo: Inge Morat

Margaret Burke-White (1904-1971)

Photographer Margaret Burke-White is an American photographer and photojournalist who pioneered the reporting industry and became the first female photojournalist for Life magazine. In addition, she was the first Western photographer to visit the USSR in 1930. She can also be called the first woman to be allowed to work at the front. During World War II, Margaret took pictures very actively and was the only foreign photographer who was present in Moscow during the attack of Nazi Germany; she later accompanied the American troops.

Her book "Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly", in which Margaret showed all the horrors of war, gained worldwide fame, and her autobiography "Own Portrait" became a bestseller.

As contemporaries noted, Margaret always revealed the objective essence of the event and shot so that each frame reflects her attitude to what is happening. A master of dynamic journalistic photo essays, she was incredibly insightful and knew how to convey live emotions in pictures. As Margaret herself said, the camera was her salvation, a barrier between her and reality. Today her photographs are kept in the US History Museums and the Library of Congress in Washington.

USSR, August 1941, women harvest hay. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Burke-White died at the age of 67 after suffering from Parkinson's disease for a long time.

Lillian Bassman (1917-2012)

Photographer Lillian Bassman Lillian Bassman is an American photographer and artist. She was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Lillian worked at Harper's Bazaar as a fashion photographer and art director, but soon decided to radically change her style and became interested in high-contrast black and white photography. She began to use this technique in fashion shooting, thanks to which she gained considerable popularity.

Lillian was very interested in pictorial photography. Perhaps this explains the picturesqueness and graphic quality of her works. She was known as an experimenter who spared no time in processing shots and tried to shoot out of focus and at long exposures.

Lillian Bassman is often referred to as a self-taught photographer who, as she herself said, tried to "get rid of the weight in photography."

Photo: Lillian Bassman

At the end of her career, Bassman discovered color abstract photography and mastered Photoshop.

Diana Arbus (1923-1971)

Photographer Diana Arbus Diana Arbus is an American photographer known for her black and white square shots of "deviant personalities and outcasts (dwarfs, giants, transsexuals, nudists, circus performers), as well as ordinary people who look ugly and surreal." The catalog of her works, published by Aperture magazine, is still one of the best-selling in the history of photography.

Diana began her career in photography together with her husband Alan. In 1941, they attended a photo exhibition at the Alfred Stiglitz Gallery, where Diana first heard names such as Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugene Atget. Alan already had some experience in this field: during the Second World War, he graduated from the army photography courses. The couple decided to try their own hand at photography. Their first collaboration was an advertising shoot for Diana's father's department store.

In 1946, Diana and Alan opened their own photography studio, Diane & Allan Arbus, where she became the artistic director and he became a photographer. Very soon they began receiving orders from Glamor, Seventeen, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar magazines, but this was not what the young creators were interested in. In their own words, they "hated the fashion world."

Photo: Diana Arbus

Soon Diana started working alone and very quickly found her topic. She showed the world those people when meeting with whom most of us avert our eyes to the side. Dwarfs, giants, nudists - the gallery of images shown by her is impressive ... Being a very sensitive and receptive person, Diana suffered from depression throughout her life, and in 1971 she committed suicide.

In 2004, her photo of Identical Twins sold for nearly half a million dollars.

Vivian Mayer (1926-2009)

Self-portrait Vivian Mayer American street photography Vivian Mayer is one of the most enigmatic photographers of the 20th century.

She took her first photographs back in France at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. In the US, Vivian began capturing cityscapes and soon bought a Rolleiflex camera. During her lifetime, she did not care about publishing her photographs, most likely regarding them as a hobby.

Vivian Mayer's work reflects New York from the 1950s to the 1980s. Thanks to her works, viewers can see the streets of this city of those times. Mayer has a lot of images and photographs. She almost did not publish her works, and at the end of her creative activity, she did not even develop films but simply folded them.

Vivian Mayer worked as a nanny, and almost no one knew about her passion for photography. According to the testimonies of contemporaries who knew her, she was a very modest, secretive, and nevertheless eccentric person. So, being very tall, she wore long clothes and large men's boots, which made her figure even larger and more unusual.

Photo by Vivian Mayer

In addition to photography, Mayer was interested in cinematography and even shot several non-plot videos about the life of the city. In addition, she recorded interviews with the people she spoke to. All these works are still in the research stage.

The world owes the unexpected discovery of the name of this photographer to John Maloof, who bought her photographs at an auction for , without even knowing the value of his acquisition. He counted more than 100,000 negatives, which he still parses and plans to publish later. Since there were many photographs and their storage is difficult, John had to sell some of the photographs to collector Jeff Goldstein.

Lisette Model (1901-1983)

Self-portrait of Lisette Model Lisette Model is an American photographer of Austrian origin.

Lisette was born into a good Viennese family and studied music with the famous composer Schoenberg. After the death of her father, her family moved to Paris, where she made a living singing. But very soon the girl got bored with music, and she took up photography.

Lisette studied with André Kertes' first wife, Mogia André, and it was from here that she learned the main rule: "Never take off what you are not passionately interested in."

The model is considered one of the founders of street photography, her gaze is always cruel.

She told her students: “Take pictures from your guts!”. By the way, the most famous of them, Diana Arbus and Bruce Weber, just managed to find their own style, "taking off with insides" and showing the world what no one wants to see.

Photo by Lisette Model. The 1939 year

The urban environment was Lisette's main source of inspiration. In her portfolio, we see reflections in the windows of skyscrapers, crowds of passers-by, portraits of beggars, the fading beauty of wealthy women. Until 1950, Model's works were published in the glossy magazines Look and Harper's Bazaar, and in the post-war years, this style was considered too harsh and went out of fashion.

Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976)

Photographer Imogen Cunningham Imogen Cunningham is an American photographer, known for photography of plants, nudity, and industry, one of the founders of the informal association of California photographers "Group F64", which included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyck, and others.

Imogen Cunningham was one of the first women to dare to call photography her profession. Her career began in 1901 at the Edward Curtis studio in Seattle, where she produced photographs. In 1909, Imogen went to Germany to study at the Higher Technical School, and upon her return, she opened her own portrait gallery in Seattle, which quickly became famous.

In 1906, Imogen really shocked the local public by publishing her self-portrait in nude style. Since then, nudity has become her favorite genre, though not the only one. Many of Imogen's photographs were scandalous.

In the early 1930s, Cunningham joined the F64 Group, whose members asserted photography as a separate art form and focused specifically on photographic aesthetics. After a while, she opened a new gallery and began teaching at the Art Institute in San Francisco. In 1974, Imogen Cunningham published a retrospective monograph of her photographs. She passed away in 1976 without completing her last episode, Life After 90.

Portrait of Martha Graham. Photo by Imogen Cunningham

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981)

Francesca Woodman is an American photographer, daughter of painter and photographer George Woodman, and ceramics artist Betty Woodman.

Francesca started taking pictures at the age of 13. She graduated from design school and often visited the Roman avant-garde bookstore-gallery "Maldoror", where the first exhibition of her work took place. In 1981, in Philadelphia, a series of her photographs "Several Samples of Disturbed Internal Geometry" was printed, which remained the only lifetime publication.

Photo: Francesca Woodman

Francesca's work is often called phantasmagoric and even insane. Very often she herself is present in her photographs. A mystical house with a fireplace, windows, and mirrors embodies an unfamiliar frightening world. In a sense, each of her photographs is an attempt to look at her own life from the outside, and by observing, to catch the elusive. According to researchers, Woodman's work was especially influenced by painting and photography of surrealism, self-portraits of Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, the work of Hans Bellmer, and American masters - Clarence John Laughlin and R.Yu. Minyard.