As photographic technology advanced and more people started practicing this art, more and more artists who considered themselves painters flocked to the new medium. While some of the earlier famous photographers localized their practice to taking pictures of people, animals and landscapes, as the camera and its accessories evolved, some started using it to take pictures of more complex scenes, to make political statements and to capture a mood, rather than a specific subject.
Similarly, the practice of photography expanded out of the realm of portraiture, gaining an important role in the world of advertising and photojournalism. In fact, during the early 20th century, the camera started to play an essential part in the way in which information was disseminated and how people learned about world events. Images of war, pictures of foreign countries and representations of other ways of life began to be more widely circulated.
Another important step in the cultural evolution of photography is the fact that cameras became cheaper and more widely available. As a result, families and individuals started using cameras to capture their memories and record their personal histories. This gave birth to the rise of street photography, the practice of taking pictures of everyday people and scenes.
In this section, we will discuss the work, lives and legacies of photographers that were born at the beginning of the 20th century.
Without a doubt, Andy Warhol is one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century. Known as a leader in the avant-garde art world, Andy Warhol established the Pop Art movement, a trend in the art world that drew its subjects and themes from mass media and popular culture.
While Warhol is famous for his photography, he was also a prolific artist, writer, philosopher and music producer. Although he started out as an illustrator for an advertising company, during the 1960s, Warhol started painting some of his most famous works, including his pictures of the Campbell Soup can and Marilynn Monroe. Keep reading to learn more about the life and legacy of Andy Warhol.
Famous for her portrait work for Rolling Stone magazine, Annie Leibovitz has photographed thousands of celebrities, ranging from John Lennon to Jack White. While her photos are famous for gracing the covers of major magazines, her work has come to be greatly respected in the art world for her ability to capture the personalities, egos and vulnerabilities of her subjects.
Over the years, Leibovitz has not only held exhibit shows at some of the nations most famous museums but has also published a number of books that contain collections of her work. Read on to learn more about Leibovitzs life and work.
While he is famous for his work in photography, Baudrillard is also a prolific writer, philosopher and cultural theorist. Although he refused to categorize his ideologies, some label Baudrillard as a post-structuralist, a line of thought that establishes that meaning and systems make sense only in their relationship to each other.
One of the highlights of his career was his installation and symposium entitled The Murder of the Image (2001). In this exhibition, Baudrillard claimed that photography is the perfect crime, in which the picture kills the image of the object by only leaving an illusion of the original. Keep reading to learn more about the prolific work of Baudrillard.