When Sylvia Plachy, 70, got serious about photography, she was in her junior year at Pratt Institute and engaging in a medium that other students saw as a distant second to fine art. “But I fell in love with taking pictures,” she remembers. “I decided that this is what I wanted to do.” Though Plachy is a contributing photographer for The New Yorker and has shot for a number of publications including the New York Times Magazine, she was most prolific when working with the Village Voice, snagging black-and-white images from one corner of New York City to the other as well as internationally. With several shows in Europe—three last fall, another later this year—and her seventh book in the works, she says, “I am looking back and rescuing pictures that I have taken and not seen. I am at the age where I want to make sure I see them.”

Back when she was shooting for the Voice, Plachy worked continually and imagined her photos would have longevity. In fact she was creating a serious body of work: Her photos wound up in museums and private collections. Having accomplished all of that, she’s now investigating the corners of her career, digging out images that didn’t necessarily make the printed page but still resonate. “For example,” she says, “there are really interesting photos that I took on the way to the assignments. I’m rescuing photos that have been clamoring for attention. I’m seeking pictures that I can look at for a long time. I want pictures that are timeless and that have meaning to me now.”

For more, see: Legends in the Field: 5 Photographers Over 70

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Long before Facebook, Sheila Metzner, 75, began creating vast crisscrossing networks of friends, coworkers who turn into friends, and family members. With a big personality and a penchant for travel, she has built a global network fortified by wide-ranging assignments that keep her on the move. “It’s amazing how many lines cross through one another—and they increase as you get older,” says Metzner, who met Ralph Lauren after writing him a fan letter and has been shooting his ad campaigns on and off for decades. “Photog­raphy is my whole life. It has been part of my personal search. I met Warren Beatty after I told an interviewer from the Daily News that I wanted to photograph him. I got to meet David Lynch during a story for House & Garden. I told him that I’d love to work on one of his movies and he invited me to the set of Wild at Heart. I just wrote a letter to [artist] James Turrell. He bought a volcanic crater and did the interior of it.” Clearly Metzner wants an invite—and if her track record is any indication, she’ll probably get one.

Photography has given Metzner a reason to travel, a license to explore, and a way to connect with others. By being what she describes as “brave but not brazen,” she’s gotten a friend of a friend to take her into Alaskan waters so she could shoot the best icebergs and went from covering a camel race in Dubai to photographing the western desert of Egypt. “It’s a task to document things that have value, based on my own curiosity,” she says. “I always remember that photography isn’t just taking pictures. It’s a tremendous exchange. The photographer is in the picture, and I think people forget that. You are there, you see things, and you fear that you’re not going to get them, and just wish that you do.”

For more, see: Legends in the Field: 5 Photographers Over 70

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When Joel Meyerowitz, 76, was in Tuscany last summer, he didn’t do as much people-watching as you might expect from a man who made his bones as a street photographer. The area was suffering a relentless heat wave, which presented the perfect opportunity to stay indoors and tuck into an interest in still life he’d picked up about a year before. Inside the farmhouse he was renting, Meyerowitz began contemplating some old pewter objects, a hot-water bottle, and a decanter that he had purchased in a Provence flea market. Wanting to capture their battered beauty, he reached for his Leica S2 and started to photograph the items in a darkened hayloft. “I felt like I was rescuing these things from their days of utility being over,” says Meyerowitz. “I felt like I was bringing them back to the stage for a second chance.”

Read our recent interview with Joel here

Inspired by Edward Weston’s famous photo of a pepper, Meyerowitz has unexpectedly gone still-life crazy. “This has allowed me to once again experience the sense of discovery,” says the man who counts Robert Frank as a major role model and once shook up the photo world by shooting street photos in color. “It’s given me back my youthful sensibility.” That one of his gallerists at Paris Photo managed to sell a nearly nine-foot-tall still life for more than Meyerowitz could have imagined has not dampened his enthusiasm. The picture was a result of a visit to Paul Cézanne’s art studio in the south of France, where Meyerowitz managed to shoot a group of objects that he spotted on a shelf near where Cézanne set up his still lifes.

At home in New York City, where he spent the beginning of this century shooting in and around Ground Zero, Meyerowitz now looks for dented coffee pots and old metal cups. “I work with these objects not for their beauty but because of what they emanate,” he says. “They lived their lives and took their knocks, just like the people I photograph on the street.”

For more, see: Legends in the Field: 5 Photographers Over 70

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Look at Mary Ellen Mark’s photos and it’s clear that she knows how to connect with people. Underpinning her pictures—recent ones such as the photograph of the boy and the bird and earlier ones like the Damm family in their car—is her uncanny ability to align herself with her subjects. While she says that people have become more media savvy and now invariably wonder if their image will end up on the Internet, she doesn’t let that get in the way of making pictures. “My heart is still in people and in showing them,” says Mark, 74, who is in the process of revisiting Tiny, a seminal subject in Streetwise, her landmark 1983 series on Seattle runaways. “I still love the street. I am challenged by it. It’s easy to get a good picture but almost impossible to get a great picture. Everything has to be right. I like the challenge of getting everything in the frame when I shoot it.”

Indeed, when it comes to photojournalistic integrity, Mark remains as old school as it gets. She still shoots film and maintains a strict code against digital tweaking, a policy she says stems from early in her career, when changing a picture was considered wrong. “I am a realist and I believe that the most interesting things come from reality, and that has not changed,” Mark says. “I was able to convince people to let me do these projects that were in my mind,” she says. “It was like a grant to be able to do what I wanted to do.” These days, Mark often creates her own assignments; works on books, some of which include her classic images (Man and Beast, out in March from the University of Texas Press, is the latest); and takes on corporate jobs when they seem right. “You don’t stop because you can’t stop,” she says. “Taking these photos is who I am and what I do.”

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Officially, Las Vegas does not have a photography museum. But that doesn’t stop the ultimate can-do city—which, after all, against seemingly impossible odds, thrives as a tourist destination in the middle of the desert—from going big when it comes to self-portraits. Scattered through various casinos and government buildings are ongoing, informal exhibitions that add up to a de facto museum with images chronicling the evolution of a place where the only constant is change. You may need to cruise the strip, avoid slot-machine temptations, and dodge cocktail waitresses to see the work, but it will be worth it.

The most recent addition to Sin City’s moveable feast of photography is an exhibition that captures the Beatles during their one and only visit to Vegas—for a performance at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Aug. 20, 1964—which will be hanging, through the end of August, at the Lloyd George Courthouse (333 Las Vegas Blvd. South). “It commemorates 50 years since the Beatles made their one and only appearance in Las Vegas,” says Lisa Jacob, director of the Las Vegas News Bureau. “Come fall, we’ll be mounting an exhibition devoted to Frank Sinatra and his days here. We literally have millions of images that date back to the 1940s and tell the history of Las Vegas.”

After checking out the Fab 4—with shots depicting the boys ripping it up on stage and local teenagers freaking out in the audience—make your way to the El Cortez (600 Fremont Street), a vintage gambling den that feels virtually unchanged from its salad days in the 1960s. Celebrating the era, walls there contain photos depicting the late casino boss Jackie Gaughan smiling it up in front of his property, old school gamblers shooting dice, and a shimmering downtown, drenched in neon and made all the more evocative by having been captured in black-and-white.

Heading south from there, inside the Las Vegas Convention Center (3150 Paradise Road), an exhibition on showgirls depicts them in all their over-the-top feathery splendor. Finally, on Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’s second floor (3708 South Las Vegas Blvd.), you can explore vintage Vegas as a burgeoning entertainment hub. Photos in the hip and happening joint show Marilyn Maxwell sashaying around with a tiger, burlesque queen Tempest Storm displaying her assets at the Aladdin, and Robbie The Robot playing craps. “These photos don’t get old,” says Lisa Marchese, chief marketing officer of Cosmopolitan. “They’re such a fantastic manifestation of what Las Vegas used to be, set in the context of what it is today. The images are magical.”

All of that magic exists because of the ambition and foresight displayed by employees of the Las Vegas News Bureau during the post World War II 1940s. In a bid to raise visitation to the city, the Bureau hired a dozen news photographers to shoot photos capturing the excitement of Vegas. Images were then fanned out to newspapers around the United States. When a couple got married, shots of the nuptials went to their hometown newspapers. Editors in cold-weather cities were peppered with bathing beauty and swimming pool pictures on the most frigid days of winter. Celebrities, lavish dinners, and heart-stopping gambling were all snagged on film. “Ultimately, we wound up with an amazing collection of images that tell the story of Las Vegas, a city that is only 110 years old,” says Jacob. “We understand the value of source material—which fewer and fewer people do these days—and carefully preserve the negative. Beyond that, we’re lucky to have had a PR machine that shot everything going on in our city—and still does.”

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Scotch and soda? A natural combination. Scotch and photography? Not so obvious—but single malt purveyor The Macallan is trying to change that via its Masters of Photography Collection. Over the last five years, the company has made it a habit to commission top photographers—the roster, so far, includes Annie Leibovitz, Rankin, Elliott Erwitt and Albert Watson—to shoot limited-edition portfolios that get packaged with limited-edition scotch. “Photography is the ultimate contemporary art form,” says Ken Grier, director of malts for The Macallan, offering an explanation for the collaborations. “As with whiskey, when you have an exceptionally good photo, you can find something new to appreciate each time.”

Latest to join the superstar lineup is fashion specialist Mario Testino. Like the other shooters, he was pretty much given a big budget and carte blanche to do what he does best. While Erwitt focused on his candid snaps and Leibovitz produced heavily controlled portraits, Testino brought a sense of high-style to the Masters of Photography series. What drew the scotch maker to commission Testino? “Mario is the world’s ultimate fashion photographer,” says Grier. “He’s renowned for capturing real beauty, vibrancy, and energy. He transforms reality into an even more desirable version of itself.” And, as we all know, a good bottle of scotch can provide the same transformative outcome.

Those who spring for the $3,500 Testino portfolio will get one of six limited edition prints, a small book of photos (containing 20 additional shots) and a bottle of scotch that has been specially blended from six different casks along with smaller bottles of the six single-cask scotches that went into making the blend. It’s all packaged in a handsome, black lacquer box, and limited to 1,000 units. For Testino, part of the draw is the fact that scotch happens to be his tipple of choice. Plus there was the opportunity to shoot wherever in the world he desired. “We shot the campaign in Beijing,” he says. “I find the city to be quite mysterious but also full of energy and excitement. I like to bring the moment to life through the character and energy [of my subjects]. I captured the moment when people get together to celebrate, in a whiskey environment—a whiskey club!”

Grier’s not yet saying who’s up for the 2015 Masters, but he acknowledges that the pool to choose from is pretty deep – and that he wants to make things as alluring as possible for the biggest names in the game. “There are a great number of iconic photographers that we would still like to work with,” he says. “We have the capabilities in terms of liquid, locations, and genre to let our imaginations run wild.”

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It is a cool May afternoon in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Brandon Stanton, the street-photography phenomenon who in just two and a half years has amassed about a million followers (between Facebook and Tumblr) for his Humans of New York project, prowls a stretch of West 14th Street. Dressed in beat-up chinos and a gray thermal shirt, Canon EOS 5D Mark III (with a 50mm f/1.2 lens) clutched in his hand, he searches out subjects that the Bill Cunninghams of the world might pass by. Asked to describe his ideal subject, Stanton, 29, can’t articulate what he looks for. “I don’t have a pattern,” he says. “But if you could discover a pattern, it’s probably kids and old people”—with a bunch of other types in between.

Stanton estimates that he walks six miles per day and one mile per subject. His pace quickens when he spots three female African American chefs wearing toques and whites. He approaches them gently, collapses his lanky six-foot-four-inch frame, and morphs into an innocent New Yorker who’s looking for a quick exchange of positive energy and easy collaboration.

Once they agree to be photographed, he subtly positions them on a stoop, crouches down, reels off a few shots. Next comes the critical task of getting a quote that will accompany the photo when it appears online. He begins with an obvious question: What’s the worst thing you ever saw happen in the kitchen? “A guy’s face caught on fire.” Next comes the not-so-obvious follow-up. Stanton wonders whether they laughed. “We did,” one chef volunteers, “after he went to the hospital and we knew he was OK.”

Since 2010, Stanton has posted some 5,000 photos to his website. He’s appeared on the Today show and has a Humans of New York book coming out from St. Martin’s Press in the fall. That publication is probably the least interesting and most traditional medium for Stanton’s work. With Humans of New York, he has done nothing less than create a fresh form of photography that capitalizes on the connective possibilities of social media. In doing so he may represent the future of photography itself. He is his own editor, curator, and publisher, and his audience is larger than any traditional medium could allow. Stanton’s wide-reaching success heralds a new era when what matters to the viewer is having a direct connection with the artist and his work. His audience doesn’t care about credentials or credits, or the fact that he only started shooting regularly a few years back. Thanks to his prolific digital output, he’s quickly evolved into one of the world’s more popular photographers, corralling nearly three times the Facebook likes of, for instance, Annie Leibovitz.

Among the schoolkids of Gotham he maintains rock-star status—as evidenced by the dozen or so teenagers I see approaching him, including one boy in a red sweatshirt who shakily asks, “Can I hug you?” Stanton’s analog humanity in a world gone madly digital has clearly struck a nerve.

Stanton’s daily quest to chronicle five or six interesting lives began as a hobby in 2010, when he was trading options in Chicago. The job became a grind and he unwound on the weekends by taking pictures downtown. After getting laid off, Stanton decided to focus on the single thing he loved doing: photographing interesting strangers on the street. The surprising but revelatory captions—such as one from a hookah-smoking fellow who declared, “Egypt is like a mango”—grew out of conversations with his subjects. His aha moment came after he posted an image of a green-haired woman dressed in green. “It wasn’t a great photo; the lighting wasn’t good and I botched the composition,” he recalls. “But she said to me, ‘I used to be a different color every day. Then one day I tried green and it was a really good day. I’ve been green every day for 15 years.’ I put the photo up, added the caption, and it became the most popular photo I ever posted.”

Quotes became integral, visits to the site increased dramatically, and Stanton’s confidence lifted. “The first thousand fans you gain by the quality of your work,” he says, adding that he went from zero to 3,000 in one year and 3,000 to 300,000 in the next. “You reach a point where people give you a chance because so many other people are following you. Once I started getting 10 or 15 new fans per day, I knew I’d go to a million. I’m a hard-ass worker. I knew I could work harder than anyone else.”

These days he routinely receives (and declines) corporate gigs, and offers for promotional deals roll in (he turned down Canon’s social-media arm because they wanted him to promote a camera he doesn’t use). He did one gratis deal for Facebook—the company Stanton says played a major role in HONY’s existence. “Facebook changed my life,” he explains, adding that discussing it actually makes him emotional. “Everything has been possible for HONY because social-media platforms showed an interest in this new art form and found an audience for it. HONY would have a hard time flourishing under search engine optimization, which helps you find things you know you are looking for. Social media helps you find things you didn’t know you were looking for.”

Stubbornly independent, Stanton says that he has no problems with making money. But it has to be on his terms. He sold some prints to generate income and sold some more to help raise $250,000 for Hurricane Sandy relief. After DKNY used his images without permission, Stanton passed up the opportunity to sue or settle and received good-guy status for life by having the company make a $25,000 donation to the YMCA in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he works out every day.

Stanton hopes that he’s creating his own genre of photography—he didn’t even know who Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand were before he started shooting. When he thinks about success, he thinks about spending half the year traveling to world capitals and photographing his Humans there. “I want the money to facilitate what I am doing; I don’t want what I am doing to facilitate the accumulation of money,” he says. “I have very little overhead, I love taking these pictures, and it’s what I would do if I had all the money in the world. So why do I need the money?”

In Chelsea, Stanton spots an old man in a red windbreaker standing unsteadily next to a traffic light. Stanton charms him into posing, then asks him to name his greatest struggle. “Getting across this road is going to be pretty tough,” he says. That’s when Stanton lies down in the street and photographs the man making it to the other side.

Stanton quickly finds his next subject: a bearded man holding a walking stick. After his shot, the photographer bounds back and reports, “He asked me if I wanted to hear the world’s greatest haiku.” Then Stanton adds something that encapsulates the small truths of Humans of New York. “It was solid. But all that mattered is that he thought it was the greatest.”

HUMANS OF OTHER PLACES__

HONY is so popular, it’s no surprise that copycats around the globe have sprung up.

Maybe Brandon Stanton makes it look too easy. Or else people fall in love with his efforts to convey a city’s character through portraits of its people and long to be a part of it any way they can. Whatever the case, his Humans of New York has inspired over a dozen other Humans sites, stretching from Philadelphia to New Delhi to Melbourne. While Stanton is at best ambivalent about the copycats, he appreciates that his work has inspired them. “Artistically, I want to encourage everybody,” he says. “It’s against the spirit and ethos of this project to prevent people from doing what they like.” Stanton doesn’t endorse any of the other Humans sites and says he doesn’t look at them these days. Here are some of the more interesting imitators. Each of them has a Facebook following.

_Portraits of Boston _

This series stays true to the HONY style with interviews and questions, and its photographer averages several posts a day.

_Souls of San Francisco _

The Souls site has a different name but a similar format, and it features close-up portraits more than environmentals.

_Humans of Stuy _

This smaller group focuses on students at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, where Stanton is beloved.

_Humans of Tel Aviv _

This spinoff shows off the Israeli city’s diversity and reality on the streets.

_Humans of Tehran _

Open for submissions, this Humans site gives viewers a glimpse into the everyday lives of Iranians. With 14,266 likes, it emerged after Stanton traveled to Iran himself. Facebook is blocked there; Stanton has 25,000 Iranian fans anyway.

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We looked at nearly 1,000 pictures by hundreds of photographers for the 25th anniversary issue of American Photo. But when the dust settled, it was clear that five of these stars epitomized the developments and changes of the past 25 years. Genre pushers all, they made groundbreaking work and transformed our understanding of photography forever.

Photojournalists in hot zones often concentrate on battles and bloodshed, the so-called bang-bang shots that make front pages and homepages. Self-taught Lynsey Addario has endured front lines with cameras strapped around her neck, and she’s been kidnapped by terrorists and held at gunpoint. But she has come to recognize that truly gripping war stories take place beyond the guns. The winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, the author of the forthcoming memoir It’s What I Do (Penguin 2015), and a favored shooter for Time, National Geographic, and The New York Times, Addario uses compassion, sensitivity, and an unflinching eye to bring back humane tales from some of the most difficult places on earth. “I am drawn to people with hardship and humanitarian issues,” Addario says. “But I am a storyteller, and I look to convey information.”

Addario says that a large part of her time with subjects is spent getting to know one another to establish a sense of intimacy. Her closeness to her subjects is particularly apparent in a series on women who die during childbirth. “I went to Sierra Leone, where the statistics for that are the worst in the world,” she says. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth throughout the world every day. “I saw a woman die on camera in front of me. It was depressing, but also inspired me to keep doing the story. Merck used my photos and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight those deaths.”

Fresh from a trip to India on behalf of the Nobel Peace Center to shoot a photo essay on child enslavement, Addario says that each assignment usually results in at least one crying jag. “I empathize with people, and it pains me that some people are born into privilege and others into sustained misery,” she says. “But that compels me to stay out there, tell stories, and try to bring changes to terrible situations.”

Correction: Jan. 9, 2015
The original version of this article misstated the maternal morality rate, which in Sierra Leone is reportedly 1100 deaths per every 100,000 live births, according to the World Health Organization (May 2014).

See more of her work at lynseyaddario.com

Read about each of our Top 5 Most Influential Photographers of the Last 25 Years

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We looked at nearly 1,000 pictures by hundreds of photographers for the 25th anniversary issue of American Photo. But when the dust settled, it was clear that five of these stars epitomized the developments and changes of the past 25 years. Genre pushers all, they made groundbreaking work and transformed our understanding of photography forever.

If timing is everything, then Andreas Gursky was spot on when he brought his first dramatically oversize photographs to gallery walls—and the public consciousness—in 1986. Gursky is among the influential photographers of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, aka the Düsseldorf School, who produce almost-clinical, distanced surveys of powerful spaces and structures.

Gursky’s work makes us look at expansive, sometimes densely packed, scenes of modern life—from racks of candy to exteriors of urban architecture to factory floors and trading floors—
in new ways. After shooting with large-format cameras, he scans images and manipulates them, altering and weaving together various exposures in postproduction, before printing his pictures on a grand scale. By blowing them up to room-sized dimensions, Gursky created a new standard of photography.

Darius Himes, who heads up the international photography division at Christie’s auction house, remembers the shock of seeing Gursky’s work for the first time—in 2001 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. “It’s particularly impressive when you’re used to seeing beautiful prints at 16 by 20 inches,” he says. “Gursky’s work operates at a scale that is completely different from what people are accustomed to. It’s as impressive as looking at a large Barnett Newman painting.”

Collectors went mad for his enormous photographs. It’s no wonder, then, that he and his work were taken on, in 2010, by top dealer Larry Gagosian, who is astute at recognizing major talent and betting that prices will rise. Gursky’s arrival helped revolutionize contemporary photography as collectible. “Now,” says Himes, “it’s all one big honey pot, with major galleries 
having contemporary photographers on their rosters.”

The point was further driven home via the sale of Gursky’s 
73×143-inch 1999 print of his piece Rhein II. Auctioned at Christie’s for $4.3 million in 2011, the work set a record for photography. That the final bid so far exceeded its pre-sale estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, explains Himes, “shows that photography has entered into the ranks of serious collecting. The back-and-forth among collectors was unprecedented [for a photo]. It’s a great thing that a contemporary photographer did this, and it broadens the market for everyone.”

See more of his work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art

Read about each of our Top 5 Most Influential Photographers of the Last 25 Years

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We looked at nearly 1,000 pictures by hundreds of photographers for the 25th anniversary issue of American Photo. But when the dust settled, it was clear that five of these stars epitomized the developments and changes of the past 25 years. Genre pushers all, they made groundbreaking work and transformed our understanding of photography forever.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia employs brilliant lighting and intriguing scenarios to make photographs that ask questions. You get sucked into his world and wonder what just went down or what will happen next. A self-described former drug user and dropout, diCorcia’s perspective allows him to mine human emotions and fragilities via portraiture (his stunning images of hustlers were exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1993), stealth street photography (evident in his series “Heads,” first shown in 2001), and meticulously constructed scenes that could double as movie stills. It’s all filtered through his dramatic lighting, which has been embraced and emulated by fashion and editorial photographers alike.

Hanna Schouwink, senior partner at David Zwirner gallery, which represents diCorcia’s fine art, describes the light as chiaroscuro and says, “He understands the manifestation of light. He interprets aesthetics in a contemporary way but is inspired by the color and light you find in Old Master paintings. There is an understanding of humanity in his work. I think his works are metaphors for the difficulty of life and the complexity of life.”

His latest exhibition at Zwirner, East of Eden, showed diCorcia at the height of his powers, with images that merge the novel by John Steinbeck, after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis, and the Bible. As diCorcia recently explained to Great Britain’s Independent, “It’s about the loss of innocence. People started out believing that there are weapons of mass destruction, that they would never have to pay their mortgage back, that they could borrow against the house that they didn’t even own and buy another car, and the people who sold them these ideas knew all along that it was not true. It’s no different than the devil tempting Adam and Eve.” Narratives don’t grow much bigger than that one, and, when conveyed by diCorcia, the pictures more than match the words.

See more of diCorcia’s work at davidzwirner.com

Read about each of our Top 5 Most Influential Photographers of the Last 25 Years

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