Top 100 photographers of all time

Ken Nadvornick

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Rest easy all... Weegee made the list.



Ken
 

TheFlyingCamera

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Avedon at #1? Adams at #23? While I don't have a problem with Adams not being #1, I'd surely put him in the top 10. Further proof that this is just one person's (or one editorial team's) fantasy and far from definitive. Roger Fenton deserves credit for inventing war photography, but Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner brought it to the world's view. And you have to love this comment about Patrick Demarchelier:

Where Testino brings glamour to fashion, Demarchelier brings sophistication and understated glamour to all of his images.

So somehow Demarchelier's glamour is different from Testino's glamour? I guess his is more "understated" than Testino's, but given we're talking about fashion photography, that's hair-splitting at best.
 

jumbosilverette

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There are some glaring omissions, but that happens when you compile a list with an arbitrary number. Still, may influential people on there.
 

zsas

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They make these lists so folks like us can debate and waste time
 

Klainmeister

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Based on that list, I know I couldn't take that publication seriously. Well, at least the author and the editor. The comments are right on...Stieglitz at 72 and no Daguerre. Heh. Good for interwebs trolling and getting some view counts, that's for sure!
 

Toffle

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winger said:
The comments after it are better than the list.
Click to expand...

Particularly the last entry as of my reading.

"...it's nice to see that a list of the 100 greatest photographers is not nearly a large enough list."

There are many notable omissions, and some serious questions regarding the order of greatness, but it is a list of venerable, respected, talented and influential artists.

For myself, I miss Willy Ronis on the list.
 

zsas

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Klainmeister said:
...Good for interwebs trolling and getting some view counts, that's for sure!
Click to expand...
For sure! Great observation! When they've gotta attain page clicks, click throughs and all these new intertubes benchmarks, they just troll us, turn photog against photog (film v digi or Nikon v Canon or German v Japan or......), its this hornets-nest-stirring that they've gotta send to us....then we duke it out on forums, twitter, FB, etc., etc., and it feeds the process.......putting Gursky and Parr above Ansel.....genius move....

Haaa! The more things change, the more they stay the same.....
 

lxdude

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True that, Bethe. I'm amazed at some of those left off the list. I think it's futile to rank them rather than just make a list. Avedon is at the top, and while his influence is strong, it is hardly universal.
 

Gerald C Koch

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I have no idea why this stupid editor made two copies of my post. The older one has been deleted.
 

Gerald C Koch

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Quite a few glaring omissions. For example, where is Imogen Cunningham? Well the list was arrived at by artisans rather than artists. One should not really expect better.
 

Chris Lange

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A terrible list, basically a greatest hits of the easy picks for the past 175 years.

Seriously, Araki is the only Japanese photographer on there? What about Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Hosoe?

Any photographer should be aware of all the people on this list, at least to understand the vernacular of the medium, but knowing 100 of the most well known/influential -anything- is almost overkill. It's like PDN or Pop Photo creating a list of the 5 most iconic medium format cams
1. Hasselblad
2. Rolleiflex
3. Holga
4. RZ/RB?? Maybe? Probably not...

I can't even think of any other iconic choices. From afar you would be hard pressed to tell a Pentax 645 from a Mamiya 645 from a Bronica ETR, from just about any other choice. Mamiya RFs are popular, and great, but I would hardly call them iconic outside the world of photographers.

It's self-referential tripe that serves only the people who wrote the damn list. Frankly I'd rather see a list of 100 artists (not limited to photographers) that I've never heard of, but should know. As for my influences, I get more from HR Giger, the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Degas than I do from most photography. Compositionally I'm partial to the Europeans, as far as the actual aesthetics and physical appearance of photographs, I'm partial to the Provoke school of Japanese photography. After that it's anyone's guess.
 

benjiboy

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These lists are just too silly for words anyone who sets any store by them is a fool.
 
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