Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor, now usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photograph...

Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers and known for his Crimean War photographs. It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the war grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerfu...

One hundred and fifty years ago [Summer 1826] Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in obtaining a camera picture on a polished pewter plate, sensitized with bitumen of Judea. This material has the unusual property of hardening in light (not bl...

Eadweard Muybridge is often called the father of the motion picture because of his photographic studies of animal motion. He began his career as a landscape photographer, and always considered himself more an artist than a scientist, altho...

Frederick Hollyer's portraits offers us an exclusive glimpse into late-Victorian and Edwardian celebrity culture. His sitters ranged from HG Wells to the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of argon Lord Rayleigh, from Princess Louise to William...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...

George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch painter and photographer. He trained as a painter and draughtsman at the academy in The Hague. Although the Dutch painter Charles Rochussen taught the students history and landscape painting, Breitner's i...

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants. He worked as an apprentice in an artistic form of iron casting at the iron found...

Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Seba...

Edward Sheriff Curtis was a photographer of the American West and of Native American peoples. In 1906 J.P. Morgan offered Curtis $75,000 to produce a series on the North American Indian. It was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs....

Man Ray's photography would come to play an important role in the Surrealist movement. Although he had first bought a camera in 1915 to document his paintings, he now wanted to become a professional portrait photographer. Some of his very f...

Regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His sharp-shooter’s ability to catch "the decisive moment," his...

On December 3, 1938, Picture Post introduced "The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa" with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War at the battle of Ebro. The "greatest war photographer" hated war. H...

Two years after the apocalypse that was called the Second World War ended Magnum Photos was founded. The world's most prestigious photographic agency was formed by four photographers - Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and...

Zhang Yimou is an internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker and cinematographer. He made his directorial debut in 1987 with the film Red Sorghum. One of Zhang's recurrent themes is a celebration of the resilience, even the stubbornness, o...