Who are the greatest photographers of the 20th Century?
When you hear a question like that, you know that David W. Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is at it again.
Galenson is the guy who takes a statistical approach to such questions. His new list, just published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, provides the answer, based on research that parallels his previous work. In July 2008, he ranked the greatest architects of the 20th Century; in February 2007, he ranked the greatest women artists of the 20th century, and in December 2005, he ranked the greatest artists of the 20th century. All were also published as working papers by NBER.
He has also created a list of the most important works of the 20th century, which — aside from putting Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” at the top of the list — elicited mostly guffaws. And he has studied what kinds of artists make their breakthroughs when they are young or when the are old. He has published three books on these subjects.
Galenson bases his “greatest” conclusions on the number of times the work of an artist — or a specific work itself — appears in textbooks. In this case, he took five leading textbooks about photography (named in his appendices), and counted the photographers whose work appeared four or more times in them. Twenty photographers made that list.
Then, he counted the total illustrations of the photographs of each of those twenty artists in “all available textbooks, published in 2000 or later, that surveyed the history of photography throughout the past century.” Sixteen textbooks qualified (also cited).
As it happened, those books reproduced the work of 16 photographers 11 or more times.
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