20th-century American photographers

John Gutmann (1905 – June 12, 1998) was a German-born American photographer and painter.

Emmett I. Brown Jr. (1918 – September 9, 1959) was a professional photographer who is most noted for documenting Indianapolis, Indiana's jazz music scene along Indiana Avenue, a hub of activity for the city's African-American community in the 1940s and 1950s. Brown opened his own photography studio, the Brown Show Case, on Indiana Avenue in the late 1940s. During a brief residence in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s, Brown opened a photography studio and became an editor at Sepia magazine. Brown returned to Indianapolis in 1956 and established a new studio on the city's eastside, where he concentrated on portraits and did freelance photography, including work for the Indianapolis Recorder. During his twenty-year career, cut short due to a heart ailment, Brown photographed Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, the Hampton Sisters, the Milt Buckner Trio, and The Mills Brothers, among others. He also photographed local churches, businesses, and street scenes, as well as notable individuals in Indianapolis's African-American community and nationally known boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Brown, who grew up in Indianapolis and attended Crispus Attucks High School, also studied at Tennessee A and I (now known as Tennessee State University) in Nashville, Tennessee, and a photography school in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to his hometown to begin his career as a photographer. Brown was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a thirty-second degree Prince Hall Mason, and also served as an assistant pastor at Indianapolis’s Martindale Avenue Church of Christ. Many of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s are included the collection of the Indiana Historical Society.

Carolyn George (September 6, 1927 – February 10, 2009) was an American ballerina, photographer, and dance instructor.

Harold Joe Waldrum (August 23, 1934 – December 13, 2003) was an American artist whose abstract works depict color studies especially of the old adobe churches of Northern New Mexico. He also used a Polaroid SX-70 camera to photograph many of the churches, initially as part of the process in creating his paintings. However, this collection of thousands of photographs became a body of work in and of itself and was exhibited at several galleries and museums.
Before pursuing an artistic career, Waldrum graduated from Western State College and became a public school teacher in Kansas, where he taught music and art for a decade-and-a-half. After receiving a graduate degree from Fort Hays State College in 1970, he became a full-time painter, moving to New Mexico, the focal point of much of his work.
In the later part of his career, Waldrum endeavored to preserve the historic churches that were the inspiration for his paintings. In 1985, he founded an organization to promote this goal and produced a series of documentaries about the deterioration and ultimately demolition of the churches. In the 1980s and 90s, he collaborated with a few printmakers to create a collection of aquatint etchings and linocuts in a style very similar to his paintings.
Waldrum died on December 13, 2003, and he is buried in Columbus, New Mexico, a village near the Mexico–United States border. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of New Mexico, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, and the Harwood Foundation of Taos, New Mexico.

Ref Sanchez (born Refugio Sanchez, 1917–1986) was an American actor who appeared mostly in television shows in smaller acting parts. He worked as a fashion photographer in the 1950s through the 1970s.

Ray Manley (September 4, 1921 in Cottonwood, Arizona – July 15, 2006 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American photographer whose photographs of Arizona helped increase tourism and migration to Arizona.

Baron Adolph de Meyer (1 September 1868 – 6 January 1946) was a photographer famed for his photographic portraits in the early 20th century, many of which depicted celebrities such as Mary Pickford, Rita Lydig, Luisa Casati, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, John Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Ruth St. Denis, King George V, and Queen Mary. He was also the first official fashion photographer for the American magazine Vogue, appointed to that position in 1913.

Sam Abell (born 1945 in Sylvania, Ohio) is an American photographer known for his frequent publication of photographs in National Geographic.
Sam Abell's love of photography began due to the influence of his father who was a geography teacher who ran a photography club. In his book The Photographic Life, Abell mentions a photograph he made while on an outing with his father, a photograph that subsequently won a small prize in a photo contest. He credits that prize as being a major influence on the direction his life would take. Abell was the photographer and co-editor for his high school yearbook and newspaper.
Abell graduated from the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he majored in English, minored in Journalism, and was the editor of the Kentuckian Yearbook. He is also a teacher, an artist and an author.
Abell received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Toledo in 2009.Sam Abell's book The Life of a Photograph is one of three volumes begun in 2000 with Seeing Gardens. It was followed in 2002 with The Photographic Life.

William Wegman (born December 2, 1943) is an American artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.

Herbert Ritts Jr. (August 13, 1952 – December 26, 2002) was an American fashion photographer and director known for his photographs of celebrities, models, and other cultural figures throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His work concentrated on black and white photography and portraits, often in the style of classical Greek sculpture, which emphasized the human shape.