Internationally acclaimed for his portraits of powerful and accomplished people and women of great beauty, Richard Avedon was one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers--but perhaps not the most obvious choice to create a portrait of ordinary people of the American West. Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.

The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and...

Praised as "the last classic freelance photographer" by photohistorian Helmut Gernsheim and as "a true 'Old Master' of the reflex camera" by critic Norman Rothschild, Fritz Henle (1909-1993) was one of the greatest photographers of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike most of his peers who specialized in a particular genre or style of photography, Henle ranged widely and successfully across many genres, including documentary, travel, fashion, commercial, portrait, celebrity, avant-garde, nude, industrial, landscape, and inspirational, to name only a few. He championed the square format...