Famous photojournalists help us understand events through the people who experience them. Marcus Yam's reporting from Afghanistan, Motaz Azaiza's photographs from Gaza, and Gillian Laub's work on racial segregation show how different that task can look.
Below are 23 photographers to explore, with examples of their work and projects that explain their approach. The selection spans news photojournalism and longer documentary projects. It also includes the legacy of Sebastião Salgado, who died in 2025. It is arranged in no particular order.
© Emanuele Satolli
What Is a Photojournalist?
A photojournalist reports real events and public issues through photographs. That can mean a breaking news assignment, a portrait that accompanies a reported story, or a photo essay developed over time. War is one subject; daily life, politics, health, and the environment are others.
Accuracy matters as much as the image. World Press Photo's code of ethics calls for accurate captions, respect for the people photographed, and transparency about how pictures are made. Documentary photographers may follow a subject for years, and their work can overlap with photojournalism. The profiles below show that range.
23 Famous Photojournalists and Documentary Photographers
Some of the images below and on the linked websites show war, injury, and death. Read the photographers' project descriptions alongside their pictures: they explain the people, places, and circumstances behind the work.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British-Swedish photojournalist and poet. Her long-term reporting from Ukraine includes a collaboration with journalist and anthropologist Alisa Sopova.
Start with Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, her 2014 book about the Ukrainian revolution. Her portraits give individual faces to an event often seen through crowds and confrontation. She received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award in 2023 for her reporting from eastern Ukraine.
Instagram: @anastasiatl
Deborah Copaken
Deborah Copaken is a writer and photographer whose war photography career ran from 1988 to 1992. Her archive includes work from Afghanistan, Romania, Zimbabwe, and the Soviet Union, published in TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
Her memoir Shutterbabe recounts that period. It is a starting point for readers interested in the life behind the work of a war photographer. Copaken later worked as a television news producer and author.
Instagram: @dcopaken
Gabriele Galimberti
Gabriele Galimberti is an Italian documentary photographer whose projects often examine people through their possessions. Toy Stories looks at children and their toys; The Ameriguns places American gun owners alongside their collections.
The latter won first prize in the Portraits category of the 2021 World Press Photo Contest. His arranged portraits offer a different approach from breaking news pictures: objects and domestic spaces become part of the story.
Instagram: @gabrielegalimbertiphoto
Rena Effendi
Rena Effendi is an Azerbaijani documentary photographer and a National Geographic contributor. Her work follows social and environmental issues through the lives of individuals and communities.
Her books Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives along the Pipeline (2009) and Liquid Land (2013) give readers specific projects to begin with. Rather than treating a community as a backdrop, her photographs make the people living through a larger story its focus.
Instagram: @renaeffendiphoto
Mel D. Cole
Mel D. Cole is a self-taught photographer whose work spans photojournalism, music, and documentary photography. He documented the George Floyd protests and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His book American Protest: Photographs 2020–2021 brings that reporting together. It is a starting point for studying how individual pictures build into photo essays. Alongside this work, he has photographed musicians including Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and The Roots.
Instagram: @meldcole
Gillian Laub
Gillian Laub is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. Her project Southern Rites grew from an assignment in Georgia in 2002 into a long study of racial segregation and its consequences.
Her photographs of segregated proms appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2009; the proms were integrated the following year. The project became a book and an HBO documentary in 2015. Family Matters turns to her own family to explore how political divisions enter intimate relationships.
Instagram: @gigilaub
Matthieu Paley
Matthieu Paley is a French photographer and National Geographic contributor. His work explores cultures and environmental issues, with an emphasis on communities that are often misrepresented.
His portfolio combines portraits with landscapes, placing people within the places they inhabit. Look at the relationship between those two kinds of image when reading his stories, rather than treating the landscape as scenery alone.
Instagram: @paleyphoto
Motaz Azaiza
Motaz Azaiza is a Palestinian photographer from Gaza. His reporting after October 2023 showed civilians living through Israeli bombardment, including displaced families, injured people, and the destruction of their homes.
TIME included him in its 2024 TIME100 list for this work. He evacuated Gaza in January 2024. These photographs record a specific period of the war. The images put individual lives at the centre of the conflict.
Instagram: @motaz_azaiza
Dina Litovsky
Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer based in New York City. She has a background in psychology and describes her imagery as visual sociology, with a focus on leisure, subcultures, and social gatherings.
Her portfolio includes Where the Amish Vacation and Dark City. The latter contains photographs made in New York during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place period. These projects offer different views of how people occupy public space, from social gatherings to the city at night.
Instagram: @dina_litovsky
Stuart Palley
Stuart Palley is a photographer known for documenting California wildfires. He began photographing fires in 2012 and made his first nighttime wildfire photographs at the Powerhouse Fire in June 2013.
His book Terra Flamma: Wildfires at Night brings together long exposure photos of fires after dark. The work examines a recurring environmental story while also showing how exposure and available light can shape its visual treatment.
Instagram: @stuartpalley
Nora Lorek
Nora Lorek is a German-born documentary photographer based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work focuses on migration, culture, and human rights, often through long-term projects in refugee camps and informal settlements.
Her reporting in Bidibidi, Uganda, led to the Milaya Project, which she co-founded. The nonprofit connects South Sudanese women in the refugee settlement with customers for their traditional embroidered textiles. Her photography follows displacement alongside the skills and cultural practices people carry with them.
Instagram: @noralorek
Krisanne Johnson
Krisanne Johnson is an American photographer whose documentary work includes long-term projects about young women and HIV/AIDS in Eswatini, formerly called Swaziland, and youth culture in post-apartheid South Africa.
She has worked on these subjects since 2006. Her project I Love You Real Fast is a starting point for exploring that archive. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, TIME, and The New York Times, and she has also worked in fashion photography.
Instagram: @krisannejohnson
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam is a photojournalist and the International Visual Correspondent for The Globe and Mail. He previously worked for the Los Angeles Times.
He won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for images of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The winning series records the human cost of that change through scenes at Kabul's airport, hospitals, streets, and homes. Reading the captions with the pictures shows how each scene contributes to the larger report.
Instagram: @yamphoto
Acacia Johnson
Acacia Johnson is an Alaskan photographer and writer whose work explores relationships between people and the natural world, particularly in polar regions.
Her photo essay Sea Ice Stories, published in National Geographic, follows residents of Baffin Island and their relationship with sea ice. The International Center of Photography honoured her with its 2022 Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Photojournalism. Her work is a reminder that environmental reporting includes the lives and knowledge of people who inhabit a place.
Instagram: @acacia.johnson
William Daniels
William Daniels is a French documentary photographer whose work focuses on social issues and humanitarian concerns. His projects have covered disease, disasters, and conflict in communities facing instability.
Start with Mauvais Air, about malaria, or Faded Tulips, his work on post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic, TIME, and Le Monde.
Instagram: @williamodaniels
Daniella Zalcman
Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer. She founded Women Photograph, a nonprofit that supports women and nonbinary visual journalists.
Her project Signs of Your Identity explores the legacy of forced assimilation through portraits of Indigenous residential school survivors. The book uses multiple exposures, making it a distinct documentary treatment rather than a straight depiction of a single moment. Her wider work examines the legacies of colonialism.
Instagram: @dzalcman
Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado was a Brazilian photojournalist whose work documented labour, displacement, and the environment. He died in Paris in 2025; his inclusion here recognises a body of work that readers can continue to study.
His book Workers, first published in 1993, documents manual labour around the world. He also worked with humanitarian organisations and served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador from 2001 to 2017. His black-and-white photographs give sustained attention to people within larger economic and environmental stories.
Instagram archive: @sebastiaosalgadooficial
Benjamin Lowy
Ben Lowy has an archive of conflict reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. His portfolio also shows how a photographer's subject matter can change over a career.
Alongside those reports are projects about the natural world, waves, and marine life. He also works with photographer and filmmaker Marvi Lacar through Lowy+Lacar. Compare the conflict archive with his underwater work to see the range, without assuming that one part of his portfolio defines everything he photographs now.
Instagram: @benlowy
Andrea Hernández Briceño
Andrea Hernández Briceño is a Venezuelan journalist and visual storyteller. She works on gender, environmental, and social stories and co-founded the collective Ayün Fotógrafas.
In Fire Becomes Spirit, she documents the Huöttöja people in the Amazon basin, a project she began in 2024. The work explores traditions and ancestral knowledge through a long-term relationship with the community. Her educational work also includes the free Ojo Pelao photography workshops.
Instagram: @andrernandez
Saiyna Bashir
Saiyna Bashir is a Pakistani photojournalist based in Islamabad. She has worked on assignments for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Geographic, and as a consultant photographer for humanitarian organisations.
Her portfolio includes Women on the Move, Saving Mothers' Lives, and Being a Child with HIV, as well as U.S. political coverage. Those stories show a range that extends beyond a single news event or subject.
Instagram: @saiynabashirphoto
Emanuele Satolli
Emanuele Satolli is an Italian photographer whose reporting covers conflicts and humanitarian crises. His archive includes Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Lebanon.
He has worked with TIME and The Wall Street Journal. His photographs document the people caught within these conflicts, including civilians and combatants. Use the dates and captions on his reports to distinguish separate wars and assignments rather than reading the whole archive as one current event.
Instagram: @emanuelesatolli
Ruddy Roye
Radcliffe "Ruddy" Roye is a Jamaican documentary photographer whose work examines Black life, race, and social justice.
His project When Living Is a Protest, begun in 2015, combines portraits and accounts of everyday experience with pictures of demonstrations. It asks the viewer to consider protest beyond the moment of a march, through the lives of the people involved.
Instagram: @ruddyroye
Nina Riggio
Nina Riggio is a visual storyteller whose work focuses on human relationships with nature and sustainability. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, TIME, and The New York Times.
Her background includes anthropology, photography, and film work. Her biography also describes documentary work in progress about bear migrations and interactions between orcas and boats in the Iberian Peninsula.
Instagram: @ninareeg
What to Look for in Their Work
Choose one project and read it as a sequence. Which picture introduces the place? Which brings you close to an individual? What do the captions explain that the photographs cannot?
Then compare two photographers working on different subjects. A wildfire, a family portrait, and a protest can each become a reported story, but they call for different access, timing, and context. You can begin with a story near you: spend time with the people involved, learn the facts, and make photographs that help someone else understand what is happening.
