Famous female photographers include Annie Leibovitz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and Cindy Sherman. Their work spans celebrity portraits, documentary reporting, street scenes, and staged images that question how we see people.
This selection brings together 25 women from different generations and photographic traditions. It is arranged in no particular order. Each profile introduces their work and gives you a starting point for exploring it, from Nan Goldin’s personal slideshows to Hannah Reyes Morales’s stories of care and resilience.
1. Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (born 1953) is an American photographer whose work draws on her life and the lives of her friends. Love, sexuality, domestic violence, and the AIDS crisis recur in her images.
Her best-known project, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, developed from photographs made in Boston, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere from the late 1970s onward. It combines intimate pictures with a music soundtrack, giving the sequence the feeling of a personal diary.
Look at how the relationships between pictures build a story. A tender moment can sit beside a painful one, with neither reduced to a single explanation.
Nan Goldin
2. Corinne Day
Corinne Day (1962–2010) was a British fashion photographer who brought a documentary approach to fashion imagery. Her candid portraits challenged the polished look associated with magazine shoots.
Her 1990 photographs of Kate Moss for The Face, published as ‘The 3rd Summer of Love’, helped establish that approach. Day developed close working relationships with the people she photographed.
Her book Diary (2000) recorded her own life and circle of friends. It shows how closely her personal and fashion work could overlap, with intimacy and vulnerability running through both.
Corinne Day
3. Sophie Calle
Calle (born 1953) is a French artist who combines photography, writing, and actions carried out according to rules she sets herself. Her projects explore privacy, absence, identity, and intimacy.
For Suite Vénitienne (1980), she followed a man from Paris to Venice, recording his movements through photographs and notes. The work turns observation into a story while raising questions about surveillance.
In The Hotel (1981), she worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel and photographed guests’ belongings. The objects become clues to lives she could only partly know. Read her photographs alongside their texts; the two are parts of the same work.
Sophie Calle
4. Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing (born 1963) is a British artist whose photographs and films examine the gap between public appearance and private thought.
For Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–1993), she asked strangers to write a message and then photographed them holding it.
The handwritten statements give each sitter a voice within the portrait. They can complicate the assumptions a viewer makes from clothes, expression, or occupation. Her later use of masks and disguise also asks how much a face can tell us about a person.
Gillian Wearing
5. Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was an American photographer whose portraits brought an unusually direct encounter with her subjects. Much of her work was made in New York, including Times Square, the Lower East Side, and Coney Island.
She photographed children, couples, circus performers, and people whose lives challenged social expectations. Reducing her work to a list of supposedly unusual people misses the individuality of those encounters.
The Met’s 2016 exhibition Diane Arbus: In the Beginning examined her work from 1956 to 1962. Its archive is a starting point for seeing how her approach developed through photographs of people in the city around her.
Diane Arbus
6. Deborah Copaken
Deborah Copaken (born 1966) is an American writer and photographer. Her war photography years, from 1988 to 1992, took her to Afghanistan, Romania, Zimbabwe, and the Soviet Union, among other places. Paris served as her base between assignments.
Her photographs appeared in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. She later worked as a television news producer and continued to write and photograph.
Copaken’s memoir Shutterbabe offers a view of the working life behind the images. Her career is one example of how photojournalists can tell stories across photography, television, and books.
Deborah Copaken
7. Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz (born 1949) is an American portrait photographer known for images of musicians, actors, and other public figures. She began photographing for Rolling Stone in 1970 and later worked for Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Her portraits range from close, intimate encounters to elaborate staged scenes. Pose, setting, and the relationship between the people in the frame often carry as much meaning as a facial expression.
She photographed John Lennon on the day he was killed, December 8, 1980. The picture of Lennon curled around Yoko Ono became the cover of Rolling Stone’s January 22, 1981 issue.
Annie Leibovitz
8. Vivian Maier
Vivian Dorothy Maier (1926–2009) was an American photographer who worked as a nanny and made pictures in her spare time. Much of her street photography records everyday life in Chicago and New York.
Her archive includes street portraits, self-portraits, city scenes, films, and audio recordings. She left more than 100,000 negatives, with much of the work unseen by a wider audience during her lifetime.
The discovery began at a Chicago auction in 2007, before her death in 2009. John Maloof went on to reconstruct much of the archive and bring it to public attention.
Vivian Maier
9. Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was an American documentary photographer whose pictures recorded the human effects of the Great Depression. Before that work, she ran a portrait studio in San Francisco.
She photographed migrant workers and displaced families for the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration. Her portraits connect people’s expressions and gestures with the conditions around them.
Migrant Mother (1936) shows Florence Owens Thompson with her children in Nipomo, California. Lange made it while working for the Resettlement Administration. The surviving sequence is worth studying alongside the familiar image: it shows how different frames describe the same encounter.
Dorothea Lange
10. Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman (born 1954) is an American artist known for conceptual portraits in which she takes on invented roles. Costume, makeup, pose, and setting help her examine the ways images construct identity.
In Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), she appears as characters that recall familiar types from cinema. The scenes look as if they belong to films, but they do not reproduce actual movie moments.
Although Sherman appears in the photographs, the series is not a straightforward record of her own life. MoMA distinguishes these fictional characters from self-portraits. Looking for the role being performed is more revealing than treating every image as autobiography.
Cindy Sherman
11. Candida Höfer
Höfer (born 1944) is a German architectural photographer known for large-scale color pictures of interiors. Libraries, museums, concert halls, hotels, and palaces recur in her work.
She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where her teachers included Bernd and Hilla Becher. Her photographs give close attention to the organization of a room and the light within it.
Many of these public spaces are photographed without people. Their absence directs attention toward the buildings’ intended users: the readers, audiences, guests, and visitors for whom the spaces were designed.
Candida Höfer
12. Hilla Becher
Hilla Becher (1934–2015) worked with her husband, Bernd Becher, on photographs of industrial buildings and structures. They began collaborating in 1959.
Their best-known works are typologies: grids of black-and-white pictures comparing examples of the same type of structure. Winding towers and blast furnaces become subjects for close comparison.
The consistent frontal approach makes small differences in shape and construction easier to see. They also made wider landscape views that place the structures within industrial sites. Looking at both formats shows how a subject changes when it is isolated or seen in its surroundings.
Hilla and Bernd Becher
13. Sam Taylor-Johnson
Sam Taylor-Johnson (born 1967), previously known as Sam Taylor-Wood, is a British artist and filmmaker. Her photographs and moving-image work explore emotion, vulnerability, and performance.
Crying Men (2002–2004) presents well-known actors in tears. The series includes Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, and other performers, each directed to cry for the camera.
The pictures leave a question open: how does an expression made for a photograph relate to a private feeling? Her work in film includes Nowhere Boy (2009), her first feature, about John Lennon’s teenage years.
Sam Taylor-Johnson
14. Imogen Cunningham
Cunningham (1883–1976) was an American photographer whose subjects included portraits, nudes, flowers, and city life. Her career moved from early soft-focus work to sharply defined botanical studies and street photographs.
She helped found Group f/64 in 1932 alongside photographers including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The group promoted sharply focused images and attention to photographic detail.
Her plant studies turn leaves and petals into subjects of shape, texture, and light. Later, she photographed people in San Francisco’s streets. The range of her work is a reason to look beyond the flower photographs for which she is often remembered.
Imogen Cunningham
15. Gerda Taro
Gerda Taro (1910–1937) was a German war photographer who covered the Spanish Civil War. She worked with Robert Capa and also developed an independent practice as a photojournalist.
Taro left Germany for Paris in 1933. When the war began in 1936, she and Capa covered it together for Vu. Her pictures recorded soldiers, civilians, and the consequences of the conflict.
She died after being struck by a tank while covering the Republican offensive at Brunete in July 1937. ICP’s archive presents her work under her own name, allowing readers to explore the photographs beyond her association with Capa.
Gerda Taro
16. Sally Mann
The American Sally Mann (born 1951) is known for large-format photographs that explore family, memory, place, and mortality.
Immediate Family (1992) brought her national attention through pictures made while photographing her young children. Those images remain central to discussions of childhood, intimacy, and the boundaries of family photography.
Her later Southern landscapes connect place with history. She experimented with antique lenses and the wet plate collodion process. Flares, streaks, blur, and other marks became part of the pictures’ appearance. The National Gallery of Art’s 2018 exhibition A Thousand Crossings brought her family and landscape work into the same wider account of the American South.
Sally Mann
17. Zoe Strauss
Zoe Strauss (born 1970) is an American photographer closely associated with Philadelphia. Her pictures include street portraits, buildings, and signs, with attention to the beauty and difficulty of everyday life.
Between 2001 and 2010, she held annual public exhibitions beneath an I-95 overpass in South Philadelphia. This placed the photographs within the city whose people and places were central to her work.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2012 exhibition Zoe Strauss: Ten Years surveyed that project. It brought together photographs, slideshows, and a citywide billboard project, showing how the setting in which people encounter an image can be part of the work.
Zoe Strauss
18. Martine Franck
Martine Franck (1938–2012) was a Belgian documentary and portrait photographer. She studied art history in Madrid and Paris before working at Time-Life as an assistant to Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili.
Her work included portraits of artists and writers, a long association with the Théâtre du Soleil, and projects about older people and communities such as the Gaelic-speaking population of Tory Island, Ireland.
She became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1983. Her photographs offer a way into documentary work built around attention to people’s daily lives, as well as the decisive moment within an encounter.
Martine Franck
19. Kunié Sugiura
Kunié Sugiura is a Japanese artist born in Nagoya who has worked across photography and painting. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967.
After experimenting with color photography in the 1960s, she combined photographs and acrylic paint on canvas in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she began making photograms using everyday objects.
Her work explores light, time, and the material nature of a photograph. The changing relationship between recognizable forms and abstract shapes makes her a starting point for readers interested in photography beyond a conventional camera image.
Kunié Sugiura
20. Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker whose work moves between photographs, video installations, and cinema.
Her Women of Allah photographs combine portraits with handwritten text. Across her work, she explores questions of gender, power, identity, and belonging. Her images connect these themes with the experience of exile.
Her gallery’s archive includes both photographic series and moving-image works such as Rapture (1999). Seeing the two together helps explain how her use of bodies, space, and contrasting tones carries across different media.
Shirin Neshat
21. Tina Modotti
Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was an Italian-born photographer whose work joined formal experimentation with social and political concerns. She moved to the United States as a teenager and worked as an actress and model before developing her photographic career.
In 1923, she moved to Mexico City with Edward Weston, where they opened a portrait studio. Her photographs include flowers, architectural forms, workers, and public demonstrations.
The pictures show how attention to shape and composition can coexist with a concern for the lives of the people photographed. Her years in Mexico are central to understanding both sides of her work.
Tina Modotti
22. Gisèle Freund
Gisèle Freund (1908–2000) was a German-born French photographer known for portraits of writers and artists, as well as documentary reporting. She fled Germany in 1933 and continued her studies in Paris.
Her sitters included Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Colette, and Simone de Beauvoir. She became an early advocate of color portraiture, using color film in the late 1930s when it was still a new medium in France.
Freund also wrote about photography and argued for recognition of photographers as authors. In 1981, she made the official portrait of French president François Mitterrand. Her career connects making photographs with thinking about their place in public life.
Virginia Woolf by Gisèle Freund
23. Rineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959) is a Dutch photographer known for portraits made in series. Her subjects often face the camera against restrained backgrounds, drawing attention to posture and expression.
She began Beach Portraits in 1992, photographing adolescents at the edge of the sea. The similar settings make differences between the sitters more visible without turning them into interchangeable examples.
Other projects follow individuals as they change over time. Her Almerisa series began in 1994 with a portrait of a young Bosnian girl at a Dutch refugee center. Looking across a sequence shows what a single portrait cannot: the gradual signs of a changing life.
Rineke Dijkstra
24. Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) was an American photographer whose career ranged from industrial subjects to international reporting. She became LIFE magazine’s first female staff photographer in 1936.
She reported from combat zones during WWII, including North Africa, Italy, and Germany. Her work took the camera into places where both access and physical survival were difficult.
Her photograph of Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of LIFE’s first issue in November 1936. Comparing that assignment with her war reporting shows the range of subjects one photographer can pursue.
Joseph Stalin by Margaret Bourke-White
25. Hannah Reyes Morales
Hannah Reyes Morales is a Filipino photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer. Her work pays attention to care, resilience, and the ways people make a home under difficult conditions.
For Living Lullabies, she photographed caregivers and children during nighttime rituals in places including Liberia, Mongolia, and the Turkish-Syrian border. The project explores how songs and stories can help families create a sense of safety.
Her account of the work emphasizes trust and the time spent getting to know people before making pictures. It is a reminder to look beyond a photograph’s dramatic subject and consider the relationship that made the image possible.
Hannah Reyes Morales
Conclusion
These 25 female photographers show how many forms a photographic practice can take. Goldin builds a personal narrative through a sequence. The Bechers compare structures through repeated viewpoints. Sherman invents characters, while Reyes Morales reports on the lives of real families.
Choose one project that interests you and spend time with the full series. Notice what changes between frames, what stays consistent, and how captions or accompanying texts affect your reading. A familiar single image is often only the beginning of the work.
