Biographies of photographers whose images shaped art, fashion, journalism, and film culture. Explore their backgrounds, signature styles, and most influential work.
American writers
Mason Williams is the American guitarist, composer, writer, and visual artist behind the 1968 instrumental hit “Classical Gas.” The song made him widely known, but his career also includes television comedy writing, live and recorded music, photography, and conceptual art. This is the Mason Williams associated with “Classical Gas,” not
American actors
Leonard Nimoy was the actor who made Spock one of television’s most enduring characters, shaping the half-human, half-Vulcan officer into a symbol of logic, restraint and belonging. He is inseparable from Spock, but he was also a director, photographer, author, poet and narrator whose work explored identity,
Photography
John Byrne Cooke was an American photographer, filmmaker, writer, and music-world figure best known for documenting blues musicians and the communities around them. He also moved in the creative orbit of Bob Dylan’s mid-1970s Rolling Thunder Revue, although his role in that project is sometimes described more
Photography
Gordon Parks was an American photographer, writer, composer, and filmmaker who used images, books, music, and movies to tell stories about Black American life and the forces that shaped it. His work shows how racism and poverty affected everyday people while insisting on their dignity, beauty, family bonds, humor, style,
Photography
Slava Mogutin is a Russian-born American artist, writer, photographer, and LGBTQ+ activist. He became known through openly gay journalism and activism in post-Soviet Russia, then built a multidisciplinary practice in the United States after receiving political asylum. His poetry, prose, photography, collage, performance, and collaborative projects connect private
Photography
Sean Flynn usually refers to Sean Leslie Flynn (1941–1970), Errol Flynn’s son: an actor who became a war photojournalist and disappeared in Cambodia in April 1970 while traveling with photographer Dana Stone. No confirmed account of what happened to either man has been established. A different Sean Flynn,
Photography
Sasha Siemel was a Latvian-born American explorer, writer, photographer, and lecturer best known for his years in Brazil’s Mato Grosso and Pantanal. He became internationally famous for accounts of hunting jaguars with a spear, but he was also a popular interpreter of Brazil’s interior for English-speaking
Photography
Sadakichi Hartmann was a Japanese-German American poet, playwright, art critic, lecturer, and occasional screen performer whose work connected literary culture, photography, theater, and early modern art in the United States. He is especially important for arguing that photography should be judged as a serious art form before that view
Photography
Lia Chang is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes acting, singing, filmmaking, documentary photography, and Asian American arts advocacy. She is known for performing on stage and screen while also documenting artists, cultural events, and community life through film and photography. If you have seen her name in a theatre
Photography
Lee Miller was an American photographer, Surrealist artist, and British Vogue war correspondent whose work ranged from fashion and portraiture to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. She first became known as a Vogue model in the 1920s, moved to Paris in 1929 to study and work in photography, opened
Photography
Larry Clark is the American photographer and filmmaker born in 1943 whose work examines youth, drugs, sex, violence, and subcultures from close range. He is best known for the 1971 photo book *Tulsa* and for directing the 1995 film *Kids*, though several other public figures share his name. His photographs
Photography
Jun Fujita was a Japanese American photojournalist and newspaper worker associated with the Chicago Tribune who photographed Chicago in the early 20th century. Born in Japan, he built his career in Chicago and left a visual record of major news events, street life, and people who received less attention in