and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The exhibitions he organized (e.g.,Light. 1968)
were notable for their conceptualism.
Wynn Bullock’s (1902–1975) finely printed
images of landscapes and nudes-in-landscapes
from the 1950s and 1960s had a philosophical
bent to them. The poetic black-and-white imagery
of Paul Caponigro (b. 1932) is similar. He has
taught in many institutions and has been the sub-
ject of solo exhibitions at many major museums.
Beaumont Newhall (1908–1993) was, for all intents
and purposes, the most important (particularly in the
United States) photohistorian of the twentieth cen-
tury. As a photographer, curator, and author he
worked at many important institutions and with
many important photographers. The many editions
of the textbook that grew from the catalogue of a
seminal 1937 exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art became the standard history of the subject until
late in the twentieth century. His wife, Nancy Parker
Newhall (1908–1974), was an invaluable assistant
and published seminal documents and treatments
of photohistory.
Pioneering Fashion and Portrait Photographers
The work of certain fashion and portrait photogra-
phers has been recognized as artworthy and influen-
tial. Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was the prototype of
the aristocratic society portraitist. Talented in many
areas, his fashion imagery and celebrity photographs
are widely known. He was also a prolific writer (par-
ticularly about his own career), a cartoonist, painter,
and a film and theatrical designer. Besides his work
for magazines such asHarper’sandVogue,hetrans-
formed himself into a war photographer in the 1940s
and later became official photographer to the Royal
family. Horst P. Horst (1906–1999) is remembered
for the fashion and advertising images he made dur-
ing his long tenure as a Conde ́Nast photographer.
The Canadian portraitist, Yousuf Karsh (1908–
2002) photographed many important figures in the
twentieth century. Images such as his famousWin-
ston Churchill(1941) appeared in magazines and
were later collected into picture books. Gise`le
Freund (b. 1908) made definitive portraits of early
and mid-twentieth-century writers and intellec-
tuals, some in color. Arnold Newman (b. 1918)
became well known for his pictures of, as he said,
‘‘people in their natural surroundings,’’ mostly
artists, scientists and politicians.
Irving Penn (b. 1917) helped raise fashion photo-
graphytothestatusofart.Astudentoftheinfluential
editor/art director, Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971),
by the late 1940s, Penn was photographing for
Vogue.His work evolved from motion images set in
outdoor locations, to isolated portraits with blank
backgrounds. His sitters range from a broad mix of
cultures, ethnicities, and classes. Richard Avedon
(1923–2004) also studied under Brodovitch and
became an important fashion photographer, particu-
larly forHarper’s Bazaar, in the post-war era. His
work also came to use blank backgrounds. His pro-
te ́ge ́, Hiro (b. 1930) used color effectively and em-
braced a more collective kind of production than had
been used by masters of photography before.
Herb Ritts (1952–2002) photographed celebrities
and models in a way that looked back to classic
Hollywood photos. Annie Liebovitz’s (b. 1949)
self-aware portraits of actors and musicians
appeared in magazines and collected in books.
Beginning in the 1970s, William Wegman (b.
1943) applied the conventions of celebrity and fash-
ion portraiture to his pet (Weimaraner) dogs to
produce witty, irreverent images that have become
landmarks of late modern photography.Defining the Documentary
Documentary photographers made inroads in
terms of subject matter and in their relationship to
their subjects. Their work ranges from ‘‘ethnic’’
subjects to images that reference provocative social
issues. Arnold Genthe’s (1869–1942) photographs
of San Francisco’s Chinatown are regarded as
important documents of that community. Devoting
himself to documenting the vanishing tribes and
customs, between 1907 and 1930 Edward Sheriff
Curtis (1868–1952) published his enormous multi-
volume,The North American Indian, the century’s
most exhaustive ethnographic survey. Though the
resulting images are now seen as heavily contrived,
they are important as art and information.
Photographing his countrymen outside of Co-
logne in 1910, the German photographer August
Sander (1876–1964) began work on ‘‘Man of the
Twentieth Century,’’ which was to be a catalogue of
the various types and classes that made up society. In
1929, his book,Anlitz der Zeit(Face of Our Time),
the first installment in the massive project, was pub-
lished. It was suppressed by the Nazis for its wide
range of ‘‘undesirable’’ types.
Lewis Hine’s (1874–1940) series of immigrants in
Ellis Island (1905) and the photographs he took
while working as an investigator and reporter for
the National Child Labor Committee (1908–1916)
are pioneering works of social documentary. His
resourcefulness in gaining access to factories and
sweatshops is legendary. Hine’s ‘‘photointerpreta-
tions’’ as he called them, were used on pamphlets,HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY PIONEERS