Fun and festive, Nuit de Noël (Happy Couple) is exemplary of Malick Sidibé’s best known body of work: photographs of young people at social gatherings and events during the 1960s and 1970s.
photography
László Moholy-Nagy's Photogram forces the viewer to question what a photograph is.
László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram
Can we ever really see and experience a site without comparing it to the photographs of that same scene?
Binh Danh, Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite CA, May ...
On This Site reminds us of the many tragedies that have marked American history and yet remain unmarked, on-site and in the present.
Joel Sternfeld, On This Site—The Stonewall Inn
Niépce's heliograph is the earliest surviving camera-made photograph.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window ...
Achieving clear daguerreotypes from the unprecedented process of photographing through a telescope was anything but easy.
John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, ...
The Bechers captured industrial forms with stunning austerity and incredible consistency.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1988
The Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II understood the power of photographic representation.
Photograph of Abdülhamid II
Paglen’s photographs of the CIA’s black sites speak to an enduring quality of photography as a means of visual testimony.
Trevor Paglen, The Black Sites—The Salt Pit, ...
Sunburn GSP #166 (Mohave/Winter Solstice Day) traces the arc of the Sun over four hours as it moved across the sky in the Mojave Desert during the Winter solstice
Chris McCaw, Sunburned, GSP #166, Mohave/Winter Solstice
Baldus’s Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles aspired to use photography to make an imagined reality visible, tangible, and therefore achievable.
Édouard Baldus, Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles
Have you ever wondered what it took to take a photograph in the 1800s?
Muybridge, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion
Getty ...
How do we picture a shifting urban landscape constantly on the verge of disappearing?
Stan Douglas, Every Building on 100 West ...
“A poetics of drunkenness” is how the artist Martha Rosler once described her 24-panel photo-text installation, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.
Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate ...
Galton, who founded the Eugenics movement made composite portraits to validate his stereotypes.
Francis Galton, eugenics, and photography
A drop of milk landing into a bowl makes an elegant crown shape, thanks to Edgerton’s stroboscope.
Harold Edgerton, Milk-Drop Coronet Splash
Notman's photograph of protruding ice provided a way for people to imagine the failure or success of a Canadian city’s ability to cope with the forces of nature.
William Notman, Ice Shove, Commissioner Street, Montreal
Architectural Anarchy in Mexico City not only conveys a critique towards the rapid growth of modernist architecture characteristic of changing time in Mexico, but it also challenges Mexican muralism.
Lola Álvarez Bravo, Architectural Anarchy in Mexico ...
Ferrez intentionally concealed the brutal and inhumane conditions of slavery in Brazil in his photograph
Marc Ferrez, Slaves at a Coffee Yard ...
In the 1860s Carleton Watkins loaded a team of mules with his mammoth-plate camera and glass negatives and ventured into Yosemite Valley.
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