Roman Vishniac

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) begins to edit Camera Notes, a journal published by the Camera Club of New York.

Frances Benjamin Johnston organizes an exhibition of 28 female photographers that opens in Paris concurrent with the Exposition. The 142 prints travel to Russia before returning to Paris, where they are shown at the Photo Club in 1901.

In Germany, Deckel invents a prototype leaf shutter and Zeiss introduces the Tessar lens.

F. Holland Day's The New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris includes 35 Edward Steichen prints.

Alfred Stieglitz stops working with the Camera Club of New York and forms the Photo-Secession with a group of other photographers that includes Gertrude Käsebier. The group advocates a pictorial approach to the medium and emphasizes craftsmanship.

Alfred Stieglitz begins publishing the quarterly Camera Work, which consists of hand-tipped photogravures, criticism, and reproductions of work made by vanguard artists. 

Lewis Hine begins photographically documenting immigrants as they arrive at Ellis Island, a project he continues for the next five years.

Metropolitan magazine commissions Alvin Langdon Coburn to produce a series of portraits depicting Britain's leading artists and literati. The photographs soon establish Coburn as one of the leading portraitists of the era. 

The Teaching Institute for Photography in Munich starts accepting women as students.

Photographs from the destruction of a major earthquake in San Francisco are published in the newspaper New York American eight days after the disaster.

Clarence H. White teaches the earliest photography courses offered at Columbia University.

AGFA (Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation) began to distribute film for the motion picture industry. By 1913 they had 40% of the market and became the largest competitor to Eastman Kodak. 

Lewis Wickes Hine begins working on The Pittsburgh Survey, a study of the industrial city and its working-class inhabitants. 

Anton Giulio Bragaglia and his brother Arturo formulate the first futurist statements in the field of photography. Anton introduces his notion of photodynamism, believing that photography has unlimited potential capacities for capturing the complexity of movement, rhythm, and reality.

Atget receives two new projects: documenting all of the statues in the Tuileries Garden in Paris and making a number of albums for the Bibliothèque Nationale. 

Edward Weston opens his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. He becomes successful working in a soft-focus, Pictorial style.

"Weegee" (he will continue to be known as Arthur Fellig for the next two decades) makes the decision to leave school to help support his family. His first job was as a tintype photographer.

Gertrude Käsebier resigns from the Photo-Secession due to differences between herself and Alfred Stieglitz over "straight" photography. A number of years later, Käsebier founds the Pictorial Photographers of America with Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Alvin Langdon Coburn publishes Men of Mark, with portraits of Mark Twain, Henry James, Henri Matisse, and Theodore Roosevelt, amongst others.

While working for Leitz, a firm making scientific instruments in Wetzlar, Oskar Barnack builds an all-metal, single-shutter, miniature camera using standard 35mm motion-picture film. This is the prototype for the Leica camera, which would not be manufactured until after World War I.

Doris Ulmann takes up photography and studies at Columbia with Clarence White.

Paul Strand, who had studied photography with Lewis Hine while a student at Ethical Culture in New York, starts taking photographs which are more sharply focused than the Pictorial aesthetic of his earlier work. Strand depicts urban life in many of his photographs taken during 1915.

In October 1916 and June 1917, Paul Strand's photographs are included in Camera Work. The unadorned portraits and photographic abstractions signal a shift away from the soft focus pictorialism of the Photo-Secession to straight photography.

The production of platinum paper stops around the time of World War I, as the cost of the paper becomes too high. Palladium papers are introduced, producing almost identical results. Within a decade, this paper also becomes too expensive to manufacture.

Cornelius M. Battey, a portrait photographer with studios in Cleveland and New York, moves to Tuskegee, Alabama. At the Tuskegee Institute, a school where African Americans pursue vocational training, Battey becomes the head of the Photograph Division. While in Alabama, he photographs residents as well as prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Alvin Langdon Coburn shows his Vortographs, the first purely abstract photographic images.

Imogen Cunningham, a year after moving to San Francisco, works in Francis Bruguière's photographic studio.

Berlin Dada artists John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and George Grosz begin making photomontage pieces. The same year, Russian artists Gustav Klutsis and Aleksandr Rodchenko also start using the medium. The German and Russian artists offer competing claims of having invented photomontage, but create these pieces for similar ideological reasons.

Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand work on the film Manhatta, which depicts the city's modern elements and incorporates quotations from Walt Whitman.

Eugène Atget sells the French government many of his photographs of Old Paris that he started taking in 1898. He continues to photograph, but instead of recording elements of Paris that were in risk of disappearing, he began to work in a surrealist framework influenced by Man Ray and others.

The German Professional Guild of Photographers allows women to become full members

Martin Munkacsi begins to photograph sports for the Hungarian magazine Az Est.

In collaboration with his wife Lucia, László Moholy-Nagy makes his first photograms.

Tina Modotti and Edward Weston move to Mexico City, where Modotti becomes Weston's apprentice.

At the end of the year, Leitz manufactures the first six Leica cameras and publicly introduces the camera in 1925.

Edward Weston abandons the use of soft-focus techniques and starts work on his precise studies of natural forms.

From 1924 to 1932, Germaine Krull works in Paris as a fashion, portrait, advertising, and industrial photographer.

Berenice Abbott starts working as a professional portrait photographer in Paris.

The Munich Institute replaces Pictorialist photographers on its staff with people working in the style of the New Objectivity movement.

Man Ray publishes four of Atget's photographs in the June and December issues of La Révolution surréaliste.

Willi Münzenberg starts publishing Der Arbeiter Fotograf.

Eugène Atget dies. Berenice Abbott purchases thousands of negatives and prints from his estate.

Carl Georg Heise curates Albert Renger-Patzsch's first museum exhibition.

Ansel Adams publishes his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras.

André Breton's first novel, Nadja, makes extensive use of photographic imagery.

A book of Karl Blossfeldt's 96 enlargements of plant forms, Urformen der Kunst (Prototypes of Art), is published. The work exemplifies the aesthetic of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.

The Film und Foto exhibition opens in Germany, organized by the Deutscher Werkbund. The exhibition features over 1,200 photographs made by over 200 photographers. Each section has its own curator; Edward Steichen and Edward Weston organize the American section of the exhibition. Franz Roh's book Foto-Auge accompanies the Film und Foto exhibition.

Bill Brandt leaves a Swiss tuberculosis sanitarium to study with Man Ray in Paris. He works closely with Man Ray in his studio for three months and continues to see him regularly over the next two years. Man Ray's surrealist circle has a profound effect on Brandt.

Ilse Bing begins working for Frankfurter Illustrierte, soon after buying her first camera.

Margaret Bourke-White makes the first of several trips to Russia. Some of her Russia photographs appear in Fortune and the New York Times Magazine.

Go to ICP holdings of work by Margaret Bourke-White

The Workers' International Relief, a strikers' aid group in Berlin, starts and funds Workers' Camera Leagues in several European and American cities.

Margaret Bourke-White publishes Eyes on Russia.

American Photography is the first exhibition to open at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. On view are photographs by Edward Steichen, Matthew Brady, Gertrude Kasebier, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Clarence White.

David Seymour becomes the Paris representative for Ruan, a Warsaw press and publicity photography firm.

Building on the 1932 ground breaking exhibition, Surrealism Paintings, Drawings & Photographs Julien Levy organized Anti-Graphic Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. This is the first time that Walker Evans' photographs are exhibited.

From 1931 to 1937 the Julien Levy Gallery was located at 602 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. The Julien Levy Archives are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ben Shahn starts taking photographs. His early projects document the streets of lower Manhattan as well as labor protests at Union Square and City Hall.

Lisette Model publishes her first images in Regards.

The Nazi government closes the Bauhaus.

David Seymour borrows a camera from David Rappaport, a family friend who owns Rap, a picture agency in Paris. Seymour produces prints and stamps them "Chim," a shortened phonetic French version of his last name. He begins photographing Paris at night and publishes pictures in Vu, Regards, and La Vie Ouvrière.

The Nazi government destroys August Sander's book Antlitz der Zeit and its photographic plates.

Margaret Bourke-White publishes Photographs of U.S.S.R., a limited edition portfolio.

Berenice Abbott teaches photography at The New School for Social Research.

The U. S. government hires photographers to document the need for and effectiveness of government aid programs during the Depression. These photographers, working for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), compile a vast photographic record of rural America. Roy Stryker heads the photographic division and hires a group of photographers that includes Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, John Collier, and Gordon Parks.

Weegee starts freelancing as a police beat photographer on the night shift. His photographs are published in nearly all New York's papers over the next ten years.

Kodak introduces Kodachrome film, the first commercially successful amateur color film.

1935-44
American photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others are hired by Roy Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration’s Information Division, to document the plight of poor sharecroppers in the Depression-era South.

Walker Evans takes a leave of absence from the FSA in order to work on a Fortune magazine project with writer James Agee.

Helen Levitt takes her first photographs, images of children in Harlem.

The Photo League forms after a split in the New York Film and Photo League.

Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell collaborate on a project documenting the life of sharecroppers in the southern United States; the photographs and text are published the following year.

In India, S. Lakshiminarasu starts publishing the magazine Indian Photography and Cinematography.

Georges Potonniée’s The History of the Discovery of Photography, translated by Edward Epstean, is published. In this book, Potonniée writes that the earliest prediction of photographic processes was expressed in Tiphaigne de La Roche's novel Giphantie.

Having completed her doctoral dissertation a year earlier at the Sorbonne in Paris, Gisèle Freund publishes La Photographie en France au XIXème Siècle. This text about nineteenth-century photography in France is the first dissertation on photographic history.

Edward Weston receives the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which he uses to photograph extensively in the West and Southwest from 1937 until 1938.