In the early 20th century, most photos were taken to tell a story. There was something in the mind of the photographer, which always came out, whether it was the story in the eyes of the model or something happening in the background of the shot.
The great Earthquake of San Francisco almost destroyed the city. Nobody really understood the devastation that it caused until photographer Arnold Genthe took a photo of Sacramento Street in 1906. The photograph clearly depicted the destruction from the fire that had started and threatened to take away the West Coast of the United States.
Lewis Hine is another famous photographer. In 1910, Hine took the photo of the Breaker Boys in Pennsylvania. The Breaker Boys were children who had been forced to work separating coal and slate. This photo brought about the ban of child labor in the United States.
Photographer Dorothea Lange took the photo that depicted how the Great Depression was affecting the United States. The photo, taken in 1936, was that of a young migrant women who was struggling to feed her family after the death of her husband. They lived on birds that had been killed by the children and vegetables that they could find in a field close by.
Lawrence Beitler was able to capture the segregation of blacks and whites in the early 20th century. In fact, he managed to show just how the white people thought of their African American counterparts at that time. His most famous photograph is one of two young black men being hung under the belief of raping a young white girl. Whether they really did it is unknown because everything was done by the mob that surrounded the two men in the picture.
There are a number of famous photographers from the early 1900s but many were never famous at the time. It has been through the ages that these photos have been found and become well known.
