Behind the lens: The 2024 International Photography Hall of Fame inductees

2024 inductees: International Photography Hall of Fame

Clockwise from top left: James Balog, Sam Abell, Martin Parr, Eve Arnold, Richard Misrach, Paul Caponigro. (Not pictured: Anne Wilkes Tucker)

The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum (IPHF) has announced its 2024 class of inductees, a group that includes photographers, visionaries and historians who exemplify the artistry, passion and evolution of the photographic arts. The IPHF class of 2024 will be formally inducted on November 1st.

According to a statement by the museum, “The [2024] inductees, though widely differing in style and practice, are individually seen as significant innovators in their respective fields. They are all risk-takers who introduced the world to new means of artistic representation and expression.”

The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, located near St. Louis, Missouri, is a non-profit organization dedicated to celebrating the achievements of the inventors, pioneers and pivotal artists throughout the history of photography. Its permanent collection includes works from more than 500 artists and more than 10,000 photographs.

Sam Abell

Same Abell (b. 1945) is one of America’s most influential documentary photographers, celebrated for his in-depth color photo essays for National Geographic magazine, where he photographed more than 20 articles covering topics from culture to wilderness subjects.

Abell learned photography from his father, a high school geography teacher, while growing up in Sylvania, Ohio. From 1971-2001, he was a contract and staff photographer for National Geographic.
In 1990, his work was the subject of a one-person exhibition and monograph titled Stay This Moment at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
He has published four additional collections of his work: Seeing Gardens, Sam Abell: The Photographic Life, The Life of a Photograph and Sam Abell Library. 


Abell maintains a career as a writer, teacher and lecturer on photography.
He has served on the boards of the George Eastman House and the University of Virginia Museum of Art.
In 2024, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Photo Society.

Photo ©Sam Abell

Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was a pioneering American photojournalist celebrated for her candid and empathetic portraits of people from diverse walks of life. Born in Philadelphia in 1912, Arnold began her career in the 1950s and quickly gained recognition for her insightful documentary photography. Arnold was a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency, the first woman to be invited to join. Her work spanned a wide range of subjects, including political figures, celebrities, and marginalized communities. Arnold’s most notable projects include her intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, her documentation of the Civil Rights movement, and her exploration of life in China and Afghanistan.

Arnold’s photographs are characterized by their warmth, honesty, and compassion. Her legacy as a trailblazer in photojournalism continues to inspire generations of photographers worldwide. In 1980, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and the National Book Award for In China. She was later made a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and named a Master Photographer by New York’s International Center of Photography.

She published twelve books in her lifetime. She passed away in January 2012 at the age of 99.

Photo ©Eve Arnold

Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro (b. 1932) is known for his captivating and mystical landscape images. His exquisite silver gelatin prints depict images of nature, including flowers, cloud formations, and forest settings, and his work forms a visual bridge between the material world of physical forms and the living spirit behind them. He studied at Boston University College of Music in 1950 before focusing on photography at the California School of Fine Art, where Ansel Adams had established one of the first photography programs in the United States.

Caponigro is best known for his interest in natural forms, landscapes, and still lifes. His subjects include Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland; the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan; and the deep mystical woodland of New England.

His twelve books include Sunflower, Megaliths, and The Wise Silence. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. In recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography, Caponigro was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 2001 and the Lucie Awards Outstanding Achievement In Fine Art Photography in 2021

Photo ©SPaul Caponigro

Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach (b. 1949) is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today.

For five decades, Richard Misrach has been one of the most significant and influential photographers of the American landscape. He is best known for his monumental epic, Desert Cantos, a multifaceted study of our political, cultural and environmental relationship to the natural world. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one series, he has experimented with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera.

Misrach’s museum exhibit, Border Cantos, a collaboration with experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Pace Gallery, New York; Samek Art Museum; and the Missoula Art Museum. The exhibition and the accompanying publication – Border Cantos (Aperture, 2016) – explored complex issues surrounding the US-Mexico border through Misrach’s photographs of landscapes and objects left behind by migrants, together with Galindo’s haunting musical instruments, sound installations, and scores.

Photo ©Richard Misrach

Martin Parr

Martin Parr (b. 1952) is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. With over 100 books of his own published and another 30 edited by Parr, his photographic legacy is already established. Parr also acts as a curator and editor. He has curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently, Parr curated the Barbican exhibition Strange and Familiar.

Parr has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994 and was President from 2013 – 2017. In 2013, Parr was appointed as the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster. Parr’s work has been collected by many of the leading museums, including the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Martin Parr established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017.

In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Parr’s work titled Only Human.

Photo ©Martin Parr

James Balog

The International Photography Hall of Fame has announced that James Balog will receive its 2024 Visionary Award.

For nearly 40 years, photographer James Balog (b. 1952) has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of nature. He has been a leader in photographing, understanding and interpreting the natural environment for three decades. An avid mountaineer with a graduate degree in geography and geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps.

To reveal the impact of climate change, James founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. The project is also featured in the 2009 NOVA documentary “Extreme Ice” and the feature-length documentary “Chasing Ice,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.

James is the author of seven books, including “ICE: Portraits of the World’s Vanishing Glaciers.” Among his other books are Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife. His work has been extensively published in the world’s major pictorial magazines, including National Geographic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Life, American Photo, Vanity Fair, Sierra, Audubon, and Outside. In 1996, James was the first photographer ever commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create a full sheet of stamps.

Photo ©James Balog

Anne Wilkes Tucker

Anne Wilkes Tucker (b. 1945) is the curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, having, in 1976, become founding curator of the photography department for which she acquired 30,000 photographs made on all seven continents. She curated or co-curated over 40 exhibitions, most with accompanying catalogs, including surveys on the Czech Avant-garde, the history of Japanese photography, and the history of war photography.

She has also contributed articles to over 150 magazines, books and other catalogs and has lectured throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Her honors, fellowships, and awards include being selected as “America’s Best Curator” by Time magazine in 2001 in an issue devoted to America’s Best.

Photo ©Timothy Greenfield-Sanders