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.

Stabled, 1990: William Wegman’s Weimaraners – Man Ray, Fay Ray, and her puppies – have become a part of the standard iconography of contemporary photography. Since 1970, Wegman has painted, photographed, and created videos of his dogs in a wide variety of witty, anthropomorphic tableaus.

Untitled, 1969: ade entirely in the darkroom, Jerry Uelsmann creates his surreal photographs in a series of steps, masking and exposing different areas of photosensitive paper as he changes negatives. He maintains some loyalty to the aesthetic of traditional landscape and still life photography.

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.

Martha Graham: Letter to the World, 1940: Early in her career as a photographer, Barbara Morgan arrived in New York in the mid-1930s, just as dancer Martha Graham was beginning to establish her importance in modern dance. When the curtain went down on the first Graham performance Morgan had ever seen, the photographer went to introduce herself to the dancer and that same day the two decided to embark upon a collaborative effort.

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

Porch Lightning, Provincetown, 1977/1985: Joel Meyerowitz made his mark in the documentary tradition with his early use of color in street photography, beginning in 1963. Porch Lighting, Provincetown is from the body of work for which Meyerowitz is most recognized: graceful studies of the weather, water, and light of Cape Cod, where he has photographed for years.