Contemporary photography can be traced to the 1930s and 1940s with a burgeoning documentary style exemplified by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans’ Great Depression photographs of rural Americans. The work of Ansel Adams too, though not strictly documentary, allowed Americans to view their country through a new lens that saw detail and beauty in the American landscape and photography itself.

The American cityscape was also important. In New York, photographers like Helen Levitt documented neighborhood life, Berenice Abbot photographed the city view-byview and Margaret Bourke-White chose to focus on the art-deco architecture of the city.

Crime photographers like Weegee (Arthur Fellig) exposed a more lurid side of the city Robert Capa, meanwhile, became known as a photographer of the human faces of war until he himself was killed by a landmine in Vietnam in 1954.

Beginning in the 1940s, the combination of photographic and textual material was popularized with Life magazine and photo-essayists like W. Eugene Smith, the photo agency Magnum Photos, fashion photographers like Irving Penn and the publication of many author/photographer collaborations, such as James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In the 1990s, this combination of image and text has been adopted by photographers Carrie Mae Weems, Duane Michals and Martha Rosler to create vastly differing political and personal statements.

In the 1950s, beat-generation photographers saw a country poised on the edge of the civil-rights struggles and the social upheaval of the 1960s. In reaction, photographer Robert Frank published The Americans (1969), a series of images that subverted the comfortable, politically promoted vision of the USA. While Frank’s work attracted criticism, his contemporaries, Roy De Carava and Lee Friedlander, further developed this photographic commentary on the social landscape. In the 1960s, photographer Diane Arbus continued this work with an eye for the peculiar. She and others, like William Eggleston and Garry Wino-grand, photographed with irony and cultural criticism.

Moving into the 1970s and 1980s, a highly staged and newly controversial photography emerged. Richard Avedon brought celebrity and fashion into the equation.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s male nudes attracted acclaim and criticism. His critics, including several congresspersons, lambasted the work for being “pornographic,” and questioned the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding policies. Not quite as politically controversial, Cindy Sherman’s work takes a feminist look at roles and disguises.

Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1990) cast her as the main character in imagined filmstrips.

In the 1990s, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann departed from the staged image, returning to photography’s documentary aspect. Goldin’s color images of her friends, many of them showgirls and drag queens, contrast with Mann’s black-and-white images of her nude children. Both Goldin and Mann explore issues of gender and sexuality while expressing an understanding of the construction of familial and community relationships.

There are many important image-makers who cannot be included in this narrow overview, and the medium of photography incorporating video, digital, installation and photo-collage work is in a state of continuous redefinition.