A gelatin silver print by Diane Arbus, titled Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, dated 1963.

(1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of 

, John Szarkowski’s legendary exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.

A year after her death, Arbus’s work was selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale—the first photographs to be so honored. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted a major retrospective that traveled throughout the United States and Canada from 1972 to 1975. A larger full-scale retrospective, 

, was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003 and traveled to museums in the United States and Europe through 2006. A major European retrospective of Arbus’s work opened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2011 and traveled to Winterthur, Berlin, and Amsterdam through 2013. In 2016, The Met Breuer, New York, hosted 

, a major exhibition of Arbus’s work focusing on never-before-seen early photographs from 1956–1962, the first seven years of her career. This show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Malba (2017); and the Hayward Gallery, London (2019). In 2018 and 2019, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, hosted 

, an exhibition tracing the history of the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career and ushered in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. In 2020, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, presented a solo exhibition of the artist’s work titled 

, which later traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in 2022, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 2022 to 2023. In 2023, the solo exhibition 

 was presented at City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand.

In 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the artist’s complete archive from the Estate of Diane Arbus. The collection includes hundreds of early and unique photographs by Arbus, negatives and contact prints from 7,500 rolls of film, and glassine print sleeves annotated by the artist, as well as her photography collection, library, and papers including appointment books, notebooks, correspondence, writings, and ephemera.

In 2018, inaugurating their collaboration as co-representatives of the Estate of Diane Arbus, David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery presented the first complete presentation of Diane Arbus’s 

 series: sixty-six images made at residences for people with developmental disabilities to which Arbus returned for picnics, dances, and at Halloween between 1969 and 1971, the last years of her life.

In fall of 2022, David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery presented 

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

 at David Zwirner’s 20th Street location in New York. The exhibition commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Also in 2022, the two galleries presented 

, at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong location. This was the artist’s first solo presentation in Greater China.

Nine publications, all of which remain currently in print or available, examine the artist’s work: 

Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov

In addition to numerous institutions around the world that have Arbus photographs in their collections, the ones with significant holdings include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and the Tate, United Kingdom.

(1919–2009) was born in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, and first studied art in the city’s public schools, including at Textile High School, from which he graduated with honors in 1938. He subsequently worked in the poster division of the Works Progress Administration, where he briefly made prints and paintings, prior to being admitted to The Cooper Union. DeCarava studied there until 1940, when he left to attend classes uptown at Harlem Community Art Center (1940–1942) and George Washington Carver Art School (1944–1945), where his elder professional contemporaries included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Charles White, among others. Some of his earliest influences during this time included Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

DeCarava first used a camera as a means of gathering visual information for his paintings; however, by the mid-1940s, he switched exclusively to photography as his primary means of artistic expression, admiring the medium’s directness and flexibility. He worked with a handheld 35mm camera, which enabled him to move easily throughout the city, embodying a freedom not dissimilar to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s model of the ambulatory observer, although with a more specific intention to understand his relationship to the subject. Unlike most photographers of his day, DeCarava developed and printed his own images himself, enabling him to create over time a distinct and enduring aesthetic approach. He was successful in his imagery from the beginning and his work has widely influenced that of contemporary artists today. He recognized early on that the process of making a photograph begins long before one even picks up the camera and is not complete until the image has been printed to its inner calling.

DeCarava’s first solo exhibition of photography was held in 1950 at Forty-Fourth Street Gallery in New York. Through this show, he met photographer Edward Steichen, at the time the director of The Museum of Modern Art’s new department of photography, who purchased three images for the Museum’s collection. In 1952, with Steichen’s support, DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on photography and to complete a project that would eventually result in 

, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which the poet Langston Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration (from the voice of a Harlem resident), reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. The book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, went out of print several times and was reprinted by public demand. Steichen also included DeCarava in a number of group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, including 

 (1955), which traveled internationally through 1965, resulting in more recognition of his work overseas.

Also in 1955, DeCarava opened A Photographer’s Gallery on West 84th Street in Manhattan, the first gallery to focus exclusively on American fine art silver gelatin photography in the nation. He was able to present his own accumulating works in a solo context while also mounting twelve exhibitions over the course of its two-year existence that featured the early display of soon-to-be canonical American photographers and advancing the artistic consideration of the field.

DeCarava’s photographs have been the subject of numerous solo presentations including those at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1969); Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (1970); University of Massachusetts, Boston (1974); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1975); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1976); Akron Art Institute, Ohio (1980); Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (1986); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987).

In 1983, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, presented 

The Sound I Saw: The Jazz Photographs of Roy DeCarava

, which traveled to Hunter College Art Gallery, New York; Port Washington Public Library, Port Washington, New York; and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. A major retrospective of DeCarava’s work was presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996, and traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Addison Gallery of American Art, The Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Saint Louis Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

From 2017 through 2019, DeCarava’s work was included in 

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

, which traveled from Tate Modern, London, to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2019, the artist’s work was the subject of a solo presentation entitled 

In 1975, DeCarava joined the faculty at Hunter College, New York, and was named Distinguished Professor of Art of the City University of New York in 1988. During his lifetime, he was the recipient of numerous awards including a Master of Photography Award, International Center of Photography, New York (1998); a Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement, The National Arts Club, New York (2001); and a National Medal of Arts (2006), the highest civilian honor awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and presented by the President of the United States.

David Zwirner announced its exclusive representation of The Estate of Roy DeCarava in 2018. In that same year, 

, DeCarava's best-selling 1955 collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, was re-issued by First Print Press with worldwide distribution through David Zwirner Books, D.A.P., and Thames & Hudson. In 2019, in New York, the gallery presented two critically lauded, concurrent exhibitions of the artist's photographs: 

, both of which were accompanied by catalogues copublished by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books (

 features an essay by Sherry Turner DeCarava, director of The DeCarava Archives, and a preface by Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery, London; 

 includes essays by Sherry Turner DeCarava and filmmaker Radiclani Clytus). 

 was on view at David Zwirner, London in 2022.

Work by DeCarava is held in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 (b. 1939) has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, 

, heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist's position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. Eggleston's work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today. Raised in Sumner, Mississippi, he attended Vanderbilt University, Nashville; Delta State College, Cleveland, Mississippi; and University of Mississippi, Oxford. In 2016, the artist joined David Zwirner. 

, an exhibition of works drawn from the artist’s encyclopedic project, marked his first gallery solo show at the gallery’s New York location. 

 was on view in 2019 at David Zwirner London. In 2020, an exhibition at the gallery's Hong Kong location marked the artist's debut solo presentation in Greater China. The two-person exhibition, 

William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories

, was on view at David Zwirner New York in 2021, and in 2022, 

 was presented at the gallery's 19th Street location in New York. 

 is currently on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles.

Since the 1970s, Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1990; the Barbican Gallery, London, in 1992 (traveled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland); documenta IX, Kassel, Germany, in 2002; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2003 (traveled to Museu Serralves, Porto; Nasjonalmuseet – Museet for samtidskunst, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albertina, Vienna; and Dallas Museum of Art). In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, 

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961–2008

, was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich; it subsequently traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions.

In 2023, a major survey of Eggleston’s work debuted at C/O Berlin before traveling to Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona. Other recent solo exhibitions have included those held at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2009; traveled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013 and 2018); and Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2017).

Eggleston received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975 and has been the recipient of numerous notable awards, including the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, République Française (Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic; 2016), among others. The Aperture Foundation honored Eggleston in 2016. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections worldwide.

Founded in 1992, the Eggleston Artistic Trust is dedicated to the representation and preservation of the work of William Eggleston and is directed by his sons Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III. In 2019, the Eggleston Art Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study and preservation of Eggleston's work, was founded in the artist’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. The Foundation houses the Eggleston Archive and serves as a resource for research about the artist, his art, and his subjects.

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced younger generations more than 

 (b. 1968). In a career spanning almost four decades, he has consistently redefined the medium of photography through a seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies. His inventive practice pairs intimacy and playfulness with a commitment to social awareness and a persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Guided by a profound sense of curiosity and care towards his subjects, Tillmans seeks to expand the poetic possibilities of the medium while addressing the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world. As the artist states, “The underpinning of my work has always been the use of my medium and everything it offers in order to make a new picture.”

Born in Remscheid, Germany, Tillmans studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, from 1990 to 1992. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, an award given annually by Tate, United Kingdom. From 2003 to 2009, Tillmans served as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2009, he was selected to serve as an artist trustee on the board of Tate. He has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, since 2012 and was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2013. Tillmans was the recipient of the 2015 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and in January 2018, he was awarded the Kaiserring (Emperor’s Ring) prize from the city of Goslar in Germany. In 2023, Tillmans was named one of the TIME100 Most Influential People.

Since the early 1990s, Tillmans’s work has been the subject of prominent solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Tate Britain, London (2003); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006), which traveled to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006–2007), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2007); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2010; traveled to venues in South America including Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; and Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, Chile, through 2012); Kunsthalle Zürich (2012; traveled to Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, through 2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013; traveled to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf); and The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2015). Also in 2015, 

, a two-channel video installation by the artist, was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2016, a solo show of the artist’s work was hosted by Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal.

In 2017, Tate Modern, London, held a major survey of Tillmans’s work. The artist also presented a new immersive installation featuring his work in music and video in the South Tank at the museum. Later that year, solo shows of Tillmans’s work were on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, marking the institution’s first comprehensive examination of photography as a medium, as well as at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.

, a traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, organized by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany, and traveled throughout Africa, with its last venue at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria. 

 was presented at Carré d'Art - Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France, in 2018. 

was on view at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2018–2019. The exhibition 

 was presented at WIELS, Brussels, in 2020. 

 was on view at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), Vienna, in 2022.

A major traveling exhibition of Tillmans’s work,

, opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2022, and subsequently traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in 2023 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern in 2024.

The artist has operated the nonprofit exhibition space Between Bridges since 2006. Located in London until 2011, Between Bridges has exhibited a range of work by artists including David Wojnarowicz, Ull Hohn, Charlotte Posenenske, and Charles Henri Ford. In January 2014, it reopened in Berlin with a solo show of work by Patrick Caulfield.

Tillmans considers the printed page to be an important venue for his work. He is deeply involved in the publication of artist books and monographs, and regularly contributes to magazines. Publications that have been designed and edited by the artist include 

 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007); 

(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012);

 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015); 

(Taschen, 2020); amongst others. In 2019, the artist guest-edited 

In recent years, Tillmans has been more directly involved in political activism. In tandem with his ongoing Truth Study Center project (begun in 2005), he has created posters for the anti-Brexit campaign in Britain and in response to right-wing populism in Germany.

The artist joined David Zwirner in 2014, and his inaugural exhibition with the gallery took place in New York the following year. In 2018, his work was the subject of two solo exhibitions at the gallery’s Hong Kong and New York locations. The solo exhibition 

, was presented in 2023 at David Zwirner, New York. The following year, 

 was on view at David Zwirner, Hong Kong.

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide. Tillmans lives and works in Berlin and London.

 Wolfgang Tillmans, “Interview with Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist,” in Sophie O’Brien and Melissa Larner, 

 Exh. cat. (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2010), p. 23.

This collection highlights the breadth of the field of photography, showcasing artists’ diverse approaches to image making and technique. In charting the reception of one photographer’s work through fifty years’ of critical texts to essays exploring the impact of music and jazz, these volumes offer an in-depth look at how preeminent photographers have shaped visual culture.

William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works

The Photography Collection

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.