Don Worth Succulent

Don Worth was born in Nebraska in 1924. Worth began serious photography in 1949, and worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams from 1956 to 1960. He began teaching photography in the Art Department of San Francisco State University in 1962. His early life was dedicated to music, and he attended the Juilliard School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, where he received the Bachelor of Music degree in 1949 and a Master of Music degree in piano and composition in 1951. Worth's childhood on an Iowa farm sparked a life-long interest in horticulture and he designed and maintained a large subtropical garden at his home near San Francisco. Most of his photographs use plants as their subject matter. He has traveled widely in order to photograph. Worth's photographs — made, generally, with large format cameras — have an incisive clarity and quiet meditative mood. Many images involve enormous spaces, and often use the transformative power of fog, mist, and other atmospheric conditions. Worth was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and received an appointment from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. His work has been exhibited in more than 50 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions. His photographs are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Getty Museum, the Chicago Institute of Art, the Australian National Gallery, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and many other museums.

Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.