Kaitlyn's Korner: Top photojournalists

By Kaitlyn Delaney
Photo Editor

When people think of photojournalism, not many names come to mind, if any.

Some may recognize the name Annie Leibovitz or Tim Walker, but most people can’t immediately conjure a mental image of their work, despite them being two of the most famous photographers in today’s society.

Let me tell you about a few photojournalists who have caught the eye of this young photographer.

The first photojournalist whose work I was introduced to was Robert Capa. Capa was a Hungarian-American and is considered by many to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer to have lived. He is well known for his photographing of World War II.

Capa covered five wars in his lifetime, and was the only civilian photographer to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day. In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos, the first cooperative agency for freelance photographers worldwide. He was unfortunately killed in 1954 by a land mine in Vietnam.

Another notable photographer, who came forward around the same time as Capa is Margaret Bourke-White. The event that catapulted Bourke-White’s career was when she became the first Western photographer allowed to take photos of the Soviet Union, and the first woman war photographer.

Before that, Bourke-White held the title of associate editor and staff photographer for Fortune magazine. Later, she would be hired as the first photojournalist for Life magazine. Her photos of the Fort Peck Dam were used in Life’s very first print issue.

She also traveled to Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia while they were all under Nazi control. She traveled across the south for a collaborative expedition with author Erskine Caldwell, for a work later released as “You Have Seen Their Faces” in 1937.

She passed away in 1971 due to Parkinson’s disease.

A photojournalist covering today’s events, telling the stories of people across the world is Anastasia Taylor-Lind. Taylor-Lind is a Swedish-American photographer who focuses on the issues of women, population and war.

She has published stories in many large magazines, including National Geographic, British Journal of Photography and Time. Taylor-Lind gave a TED talk in 2014 about the Ukrainian Revolution and the Maidan protests in Ukraine.

I highly recommend looking up the works of all of these amazing photojournalists. Who knows, you may even recognize a few photos.