Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated essays written by Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.

Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) (pronounced [ʀɔlɑ̃ baʀt]) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism.

Eugène Atget (1857‑1927) was a French photographer noted for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris.

Robert Doisneau (April 14, 1912 - April 1, 1994) was a French photographer noted for his frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life.

Among his most recognizable work is Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville ("Kiss by the Hotel de Ville"), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. The original print of this iconic image was sold for 155,000 € by Françoise Bornet, the woman in the photograph, at an auction in April 2005. Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud posed for the seemingly spontaneous photo in 1950.

Doisneau's work gives unusual prominence and dignity to children's street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect.

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and manipulating photographs.

André Kertész (born Kertész Andor July 2, 1894 - September 28, 1985) was a Hungarian-born photographer distinguished by haunting composition in his photographs and by his early efforts in developing the photo essay. In his lifetime, however, his then-unorthodox camera angles, which hindered prose descriptions of his works, prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. His use of symbolism also became unfashionable later in his life. Kertész is now recognized as one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.

Arthur Rothstein (b. 1915 in New York City – d.1985 in New Rochelle, New York) was an American photographer. Controversial photo created by his movement of a cow skull from green grass to gravel area to represent the depression era.

Edward Weston (March 24, 1886 - January 1, 1958) was an American photographer, and co-founder of Group f/64. Most of his work was done using an 8 by 10 inch view camera.

Leica is the name of several cameras produced by a German company of the same name. The company, formerly Ernst Leitz GmbH, is now three companies: Leica Camera AG, which produces cameras; Leica Geosystems AG which produces geosurvey equipment; and Leica Microsystems GmbH, which produces microscopes. Leica Microsystems GmbH is the owner of the Leica brand, and grants licenses to Leica Camera AG and Leica Geosystems. The Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera. The first prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at E. Leitz Optische Werke, Wetzlar, in 1913. Barnack used standard cinema 35 mm film, but extended the image size to 24 x 36 mm. Barnack believed the 2:3 aspect ratio to be the best choice, leaving room for a 36-exposure film length (originally 40 exposures, but some films were found to be thicker).

Pictorialism was a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism.

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. From 1898 rough-surface printing papers were added to the repertoire, to further break up a picture's sharpness. Some artists "etched" the surface of their prints using fine needles. The aim of such techniques was to achieve what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica termed, in discussing Pictorialism, "personal artistic expression".

Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed…. Responsible for the concept of “The decisive moment.”

John Szarkowski (b. December 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin) is an influential photography curator, historian, and critic. He is also a photographer. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

André Bazin (April 18, 1918 – November 11, 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist. Bazin argued for films that depicted what he saw as "objective reality" (such as documentaries and films of the Italian neorealism school) and directors who made themselves "invisible" (such as Howard Hawks). He advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the "shot-in-depth", and preferred what he referred to as "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This placed him in opposition to film theory of the 1920s and 1930s which emphasized how the cinema can manipulate reality

Charles Sanders Peirce (IPA: /pɝs/), (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American polymath, physicist, and philosopher, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although Peirce was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years, it is for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, and the theory of signs, or semeiotic, that he is largely appreciated today. The philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in the Dictionary of American Biography for 1934, called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician" (Brent, 1).

Semeiotic is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce to distinguish his theory of triadic sign relations from other approaches to the same subject matter

There are three principal ways that a sign can denote its objects. These are usually described as kinds, species, or types of signs, but it is important to recognize that these are not ontological species, that is, they are not mutually exclusive features of description, since the same thing can be a sign in several different ways.

Beginning very roughly, the three main ways of being a sign can be described as follows:

. An icon is a sign that denotes its objects by virtue of a quality that it shares with its objects.

. An index is a sign that denotes its objects by virtue of an existential connection that it has with its objects.

. A symbol is a sign that denotes its objects solely by virtue of the fact that it is interpreted to do so.

One of Peirce's early delineations of the three types of signs is still quite useful as a first approach to understanding their differences and their relationships to each other:

In the first place there are likenesses or copies — such as statues, pictures, emblems, hieroglyphics, and the like. Such representations stand for their objects only so far as they have an actual resemblance to them — that is agree with them in some characters. The peculiarity of such representations is that they do not determine their objects — they stand for anything more or less; for they stand for whatever they resemble and they resemble everything more or less.

The second kind of representations are such as are set up by a convention of men or a decree of God. Such are tallies, proper names, &c. The peculiarity of these conventional signs is that they represent no character of their objects. Likenesses denote nothing in particular; conventional signs connote nothing in particular.

The third and last kind of representations are symbols or general representations. They connote attributes and so connote them as to determine what they denote. To this class belong all words and all conceptions. Most combinations of words are also symbols. A proposition, an argument, even a whole book may be, and should be, a single symbol. (Peirce 1866, "Lowell Lecture 7", CE 1, 467–468).

Chris Marker (born July 29, 1921) is a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentary maker.

He is best known for directing La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), a documentary about Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker studied philosophy under Jean-Paul Sartre with Guy Debord. In World War II he joined the Maquis (FTP). After the war he began to write and make films. He traveled to many socialist countries and documented what he saw in films and books. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) which he codirected with Alain Resnais was one of the first anticolonial films. Anatole Dauman produced the first films of Chris Marker and later produced two more of his films Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia

He became internationally known for the short film La Jetée (1962). It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace with limited narration and sound effects. This film was the inspiration for Mamoru Oshii's debut live action feature The Red Spectacles (1987) (later for Avalon) and also inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995).

Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American-born photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. Many of his photographs are known for appearing like those other art forms, and he is also known for his marriage to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

The Photo-Secession movement was a group of photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz in the early 1900s that helped to raise standards and awareness of art photography.

In 1902 Stieglitz formed an invitation-only group, which he called the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression." Among its members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions and became the publisher of the journal, Camera Work. The group also operated the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession.

The pictorialist style argued that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Pictorialist images were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes.

Photo-secessionists thought that the strength of a medium was found in its purity, hence straight photography. Images were not manipulated in the darkroom, aside from cropping. Content of the images often referred to previous work done by other artists, especially Greek and Roman art. Images often contained stylistic consistency such as dramatic lighting, perspective, geometric, monochrome/black and white, and high contrast.

Jeff Wall (born 1946) is a Canadian photographer.

Wall, Jeffrey (Jeff) David, artist (b at Vancouver 29 Sept 1946). Known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs, his theoretical writing and for his teaching, Jeff Wall received an MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970 (thesis on John Heartfield) and did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute (1970-73). He was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-75); associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976-87); and is currently professor at the University of British Columbia. Jeff Wall is the best-known of a group of Vancouver artists including Ian WALLACE, Rodney GRAHAM and others who have associated together since the late 1960s. After experimentation with conceptual art while a graduate student at UBC, Wall produced no art until 1977, when he produced his first back-lit photo-transparency. The pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. Wall's strategy has been to recover modernist imperatives to rescue society from what he came to consider the dead end of conceptualism.

Mimic (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style. A 198x226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The man is dressed more formally, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, out of the girlfriend's line of sight. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.

Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey) is an American photographer and film director known for her conceptual self-portraits. Sherman currently works in New York.

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. Sherman's most recent series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines.

(www.wikipedia.org)