📷The Greats

In March 1936, driving home after a month photographing field labor, Lange passed a crude sign reading 'PEA-PICKERS CAMP' at Nipomo, California — and kept driving. Twenty miles on, arguing with herself, she turned around. In ten minutes she made six exposures of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in a lean-to tent. Within days the San Francisco News ran the pictures, and the federal government rushed 20,000 pounds of food to the starving camp. The final frame became 'Migrant Mother.'

On 6 June 1944 Capa landed with the first assault wave on Omaha Beach, photographing in chest-deep water under machine-gun fire. By the traditional account, a darkroom assistant in London then overheated the films in the drying cabinet, melting the emulsion of all but eleven frames — the 'Magnificent Eleven,' whose smeared urgency later shaped the look of Saving Private Ryan's landing sequence. Capa shrugged that the pictures were 'slightly out of focus' and titled his memoir exactly that.

Driving through New Mexico's Chama Valley on 1 November 1941, Adams saw the moon rising over the village of Hernandez, its churchyard crosses catching the last sun. He could not find his light meter — so he recalled that the moon's luminance is 250 candles per square foot, computed the exposure in his head, and made one frame. Before he could insert a second plate, the light on the crosses was gone. 'Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico' became his most famous photograph; single prints now bring six-figure sums at auction.

In July 1941 Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when Germany broke the Nazi–Soviet pact and the Luftwaffe began bombing the city. Ordered like everyone else into shelters during raids, she repeatedly hid from the wardens, then worked from her hotel balcony and the roof of the US embassy, photographing anti-aircraft fire arcing over the Kremlin — some of the war's most famous images, made by refusing, politely and repeatedly, to go to the basement.

In 1960s Bamako, the surprise parties of newly independent Mali's teenagers ran all night, and Sidibé covered as many as four or five in an evening, shuttling between them with his flash and Rolleiflex, then developing until dawn and pinning numbered proof sheets outside his studio so the dancers could find and buy their pictures. One frame from Christmas night 1963 — a barefoot couple dancing, 'Nuit de Noël (Happy Club)' — became one of the century's most celebrated photographs.

On 30 March 1981 Salgado was outside the Washington Hilton photographing Ronald Reagan's routine departure when John Hinckley opened fire; he kept shooting through the chaos, and his frames of the assassination attempt ran worldwide. Salgado later said the licensing windfall helped bankroll the long self-directed documentary work he actually cared about — including the 1986 Serra Pelada series, where he photographed some 50,000 mud-caked miners hauling ore sacks up ladders out of a vast open pit.

In 1971, in the northern town of Misawa, Moriyama photographed a stray dog turning to glare sideways at the camera — matted, wary, unowned. 'Stray Dog' became his emblem, and he embraced it literally, describing himself as a stray dog roaming cities with a camera. The image's snarling looseness — everything classical photography called a mistake — became a legitimate aesthetic that street photographers worldwide still work inside.