Robert Adams, born in California in 1937, has worked as a photographer of the changing American landscape over the past four decades. He has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships. His many books include What We Bought, Summer Nights, Los Angeles Spring and To Make it Home, as well as his Aperture titles Beauty in Photography, Why People Photograph and Along Some Rivers. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

During a relatively brief career, Diane Arbus created a distinctly personal style of portraiture that made her one of the great 20th-century photographers. Born in New York in 1923, by the 1950s she was supporting herself by working for magazines such as Vogue and Glamour. Two Guggenheim awards (1963 and 1966) allowed her to travel and undertake her own projects. The artist died in 1971. Retrospectives of her work have been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was born in Detroit, and began his career by joining the camera club at Chrysler Motors in 1938. He became one of the great innovators of twentieth-century American photography, and later taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago and then the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where he founded and directed the Graduate Program in Photography. He is known, not only for landscapes but also for his dynamic urban views, portraits of his wife, Eleanor, and extensive color work. All of this was widely published and exhibited during his lifetime, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s. Previous monographs include The Photographer at Work, Elemental Landscapes, Callahan in New England, Early Street Photography 1943-1945, Color 1941-1980, and New Color Photographs 1978-1987.

"William Eggleston was born in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He took his first black-and-white photographs at age 18 and soon became serious about photography, though he never studied it formally. His first color work was shot in 1964 in color negative film, but in the late 60s he began to use color slides; it was some of those slides that he brought with him to New York in 1967, when he met Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and John Szarkowski. It was Szarkowski who curated Eggleston's landmark 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York--a breakthrough in the perception of color photography as a serious form of fine art. The recipient of the 1998 Hasselblad Award, Eggleston's work was most recently seen in Documenta11 and in a major retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris."

"More than any other artist, Walker Evans (1903-1975) invented the image of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact. Evans did most of his best work in the 1930s, and his pictures have been celebrated as documents of the Great Depression. But his concerns ranged far beyond the troubles of the 1930s, and his work has made its impact not only on photography but also on modern literature, film and the traditional visual arts."

Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 to parents of Jewish descent. He immigrated to the United States two years after World War II ended, and since then he has produced work that changed the history of art and photography. Groundbreaking projects include The Americans, Lines of My Hand, Black White and Things, Pull My Daisy and Cocksucker Blues. Frank was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1994. He was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 1996. A major exhibition organized by The National Gallery of Art, Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans," will tour nationally in 2009, with stops in Washington, San Francisco and New York.

Born in 1934, Lee Friedlander is one of the world's most important living photographers. Among his previous books are the seminal Self Portrait and The American Monument, and more recently, American Musicians, Letters from the People, Little Screens, The Desert Seen and Sticks & Stones. His work was the subject of a major 2005 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which travels to SFMOMA in 2008.

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Fraenkel, has established itself as one of the leading photography galleries in the United States by presenting the work of such seminal artists as Diane Arbus, Carelton Watkins and Garry Winogrand. Fraenkel has also produced some of the medium's finest catalogues and books, including Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens, Robert Adams: Turning Back and Richard Avedon: Made in France.