Migrant Mother: From 1935 to 1939, Dorthea Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Ellen Terry at 16, 1913: Whether used in portraits or tableaux vivants illustrating religious and mythological themes, Julia Margaret Cameron’s subjects were almost always family members or friends from a social circle of prominent cultural figures that included Alfred Tennyson and Henry Taylor.

Ellis Island, 1905: Lewis Hine spent the majority of his life photographing America’s social issues: immigration, child labor, and the plight of the working man. His photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island treated the new, often degraded, citizens with grace, photographing his subjects in more formal poses instead of the “huddled masses” that appeared in other works.

The Brown Sisters, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1995: Since 1975, Nicholas Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters producing a single photograph each year featuring the sisters in the same order (youngest to oldest from left to right) though at various locations along the East Coast.

Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce #3: Ralph Eugene Meatyard worked on a variety of projects, from the No Focus pictures to the Zen Twig series, several features of “Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce #3” are characteristic of his work. Meatyard often used friends and family, particularly his children, as models in his carefully directed photographs. Likewise, the use of props was not uncommon - doll parts, dead birds, and dime-store masks were particular favorites.

A Man on the Banks of the Mississippi, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1995: Joel Sternfeld’s projects can perhaps be divided into two general groups: site-specific landscapes somehow connected to human presence (though people are rarely present in them) and shot during distinct periods of time, and a more ranging, long-term examination of the United States accomplished largely by photographing Americans contextualized by their environments

Women are Beautiful: Garry Winogrand's book, Women are Beautiful (1975), offers a random collection of women caught on the street, in parks, getting into cars, at parties, marching in parades, skinny-dipping in ponds. Is it the elucidation of an attraction, of style, of activity, or of gender in an era of transition?

Two New Guinea Men Holding Hands, 1970: Irving Penn is perhaps best known for his fashion photographs that, beginning with his notable 1950s series of the Paris collections, defined a new look for magazines. By placing models against plain backdrops, Penn removed the familiar indicators of space or scale and allowed fashion to stand alone as the subject of his images

Untitled from East 100th Street (1970): Bruce Davidson spent two years photographing in the apartments, on the streets, and in the lives of the people of East Harlem. This project, published as East 100th Street (1970), examines poverty in urban America

Eleanor, c.1947: Harry Callahan often transformed his everyday subjects—nature, architecture, city streets, his wife Eleanor and daughter Judith into (barely recognizable) simple forms; a visual essence that still evokes their worldly counterparts.