Ten image makers, from the diplomatic salons of Weimar Berlin to the gold mines of Brazil, who taught the world to get its news through a lens.

For roughly seventy years, from the 1920s to the 1990s, the photograph was how the world found out what had happened. Small cameras like the Ermanox and the Leica made it possible to shoot quickly, quietly, and in available light, and the great picture magazines, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Vu, Life, and Picture Post, gave those images an audience of millions. In between the invention of the tools and the arrival of the nightly newscast and the internet, photojournalists became the eyes of the century. They decided what a war looked like, what poverty looked like, what a president looked like when he thought no one was watching.

Choosing ten from that crowded century means privileging influence over fame. Each photographer here changed how the medium was practiced, not just what it recorded, and together they span the era’s breadth: news and documentary, tabloid and magazine, Europe, the Americas, and stories told across Asia and Africa. A few names will be instantly familiar; one or two, we hope, will be discoveries. They appear in no particular order.

1. Erich Salomon

1886-1944, the king of the indiscreet

Before Salomon, news photography meant posed handshakes; after him, it meant catching power off guard. A Berlin lawyer turned photographer, he smuggled his small Ermanox camera into courtrooms and diplomatic conferences in briefcases and bowler hats, shooting statesmen mid-argument and mid-yawn, and the term candid camera was coined to describe his work. French foreign minister Aristide Briand dubbed him the king of the indiscreet. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, but the whole grammar of behind-closed-doors reportage begins with him. Start with his 1931 book of famous contemporaries caught in unguarded moments.

2. Henri Cartier-Bresson

1908-2004, the decisive moment

The Frenchman with the little Leica gave photojournalism its aesthetic conscience: the idea that a news picture could have the geometry of a painting if you pressed the shutter at exactly the right instant. He photographed Gandhi shortly before the Mahatma’s assassination in 1948 and stayed to cover the funeral, and in 1947 he co-founded Magnum Photos, the cooperative that let photographers keep their negatives and their independence. His 1952 book The Decisive Moment named the philosophy an entire profession still argues about. Start with Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, his 1932 frame of a man leaping over a flooded rail yard, suspended forever an inch above his own reflection.

3. Robert Capa

1913-1954, the greatest war photographer

Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Capa invented the modern war photographer, both the practice and the myth. His maxim, if your pictures aren’t good enough you’re not close enough, took him into the Spanish Civil War, where he made The Falling Soldier in 1936, and into the first wave at Omaha Beach on D-Day, where his few surviving frames are blurred by the chaos around him. A Magnum co-founder alongside Cartier-Bresson, he died in 1954 after stepping on a landmine while covering the war in Indochina. Start with those grainy D-Day photographs; their shudder is the closest a still image has come to the feeling of battle.

4. Dorothea Lange

1895-1965

Lange proved that a photograph could move a government. A San Francisco portrait photographer who took her camera into the Depression, she made Migrant Mother in a pea pickers’ camp at Nipomo, California in 1936, and the image helped prompt aid to starving farm workers while becoming the face of an entire decade. Working for the Farm Security Administration, she wrote down what her subjects said and printed it beside the pictures, an early insistence that the photographed have voices too. Her unsparing 1942 photographs of the incarceration of Japanese Americans were impounded by the Army for their honesty. Start with Migrant Mother, then look at everything around it.

5. Margaret Bourke-White

1904-1971

When Life magazine launched in November 1936, the photograph on its first cover, the colossal concrete towers of the Fort Peck Dam, was hers. Bourke-White collected firsts the way other photographers collect cameras: among the first Western photographers allowed to document Soviet industry, the first woman accredited as a war correspondent with US forces, present at the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945. Her 1946 portrait of Gandhi beside his spinning wheel remains one of the most reproduced photographs of the century. Start with that first Life cover and notice how she made industry look like architecture and architecture look like myth.

6. Weegee

1899-1968, Weegee the Famous

Arthur Fellig, the self-invented tabloid legend known as Weegee, showed that photojournalism could thrive at street level, at 3 a.m., lit by a flashbulb. He obtained a permit for a police radio in his car, often reaching New York’s crime scenes and tenement fires before the officers did, developing prints in a darkroom rigged in his trunk. His flash gave murder victims, gawking crowds, and society dames the same harsh democratic glare, and his 1945 book Naked City was so vivid it lent its name to a Hollywood film and a television series. Start with Naked City; it is the id of the American press in book form.

7. W. Eugene Smith

1918-1978, master of the photo essay

Smith turned the photo essay into an art form with a moral spine. Badly wounded covering the Pacific war, he returned to make Country Doctor for Life in 1948, shadowing a rural Colorado physician for weeks and setting the template for immersive visual storytelling that documentary photographers still follow. He fought editors relentlessly over layouts and captions, believing the photographer, not the magazine, owned the story’s truth. In the 1970s he moved to Minamata, Japan, to document the victims of industrial mercury poisoning, and was beaten by company-linked men for his trouble. Start with Country Doctor, then his devastating Minamata work, made at real physical cost.

8. Gordon Parks

1912-2006

Parks called his camera a weapon against poverty and racism, and he wielded it from inside the country’s biggest magazine. A self-taught photographer from Kansas, he became Life’s first African American staff photographer in 1948 and spent two decades documenting segregation, Harlem, and the civil rights movement with an intimacy no outsider could match. His 1942 portrait of government cleaner Ella Watson, posed with mop and broom before the American flag and titled American Gothic, remains one of the sharpest single images ever made about race in America. He later became a pioneering Hollywood director, but start with American Gothic and his 1948 Harlem gang leader essay.

9. Susan Meiselas

Born 1948

Meiselas helped drag war photography into color and into conscience. Covering the Nicaraguan insurrection in 1978 and 1979, she photographed the revolution in saturated Kodachrome when serious conflict work was still expected to be black and white, and won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for it. Her Molotov Man, a rebel hurling a firebomb, became a national symbol reproduced on walls and murals across Nicaragua, and she spent decades returning to find her subjects and ask what the pictures had meant to them, questioning her own authorship in ways the field is still absorbing. Start with her 1981 book Nicaragua, or her earlier project Carnival Strippers.

10. Sebastião Salgado

1944-2025

A Brazilian economist who picked up a camera in his late twenties, Salgado gave the century’s end its epic register. His 1986 photographs of the Serra Pelada gold mine, tens of thousands of mud-covered men climbing ladders out of an open pit, look like Bruegel repainted in silver gelatin, and his monumental projects Workers and Migrations spent years tracing labor and displacement across dozens of countries. Admirers called the results biblical; critics accused him of making misery too beautiful, and that argument about beauty and suffering is itself part of his influence. Start with the Serra Pelada series, then Workers, his 1993 archaeology of the industrial age at the moment it slipped away.

Final thoughts

What binds these ten is not style, since a Weegee flashbulb and a Cartier-Bresson geometry could hardly be further apart, but a shared conviction that seeing is a form of knowing. Between Salomon’s smuggled Ermanox and Salgado’s silvered epics, photojournalism grew from a novelty into the century’s collective memory: it is how we still picture the Depression, D-Day, segregation, and revolution. These photographers did more than witness their era; they built the visual language every camera phone user now speaks without thinking.

Ten slots force painful omissions. Gerda Taro, Capa’s partner and the first woman photojournalist to die covering combat, at the Spanish front in 1937, nearly made the list, as did Don McCullin, whose unflinching work from Vietnam and Biafra set the standard for a generation of war photographers. Consider them numbers eleven and twelve, and consider this list an invitation: the archives of the great picture magazines are increasingly online, and an afternoon inside them is an education. There is much more on how images shape culture across CreARTivity.