best photo essays of all time

18 Immersive Photo Essay Examples & Tips

By Tata Rossi 13 days ago, Professional photography

A photo essay tells a story or evokes emotion through a series of photographs. The essays allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. Such essays exist in a variety of forms – from photos only to images with brief comments or written essays accompanied by shots. Choose a photo essay example that you can easily do based on your professional level and the equipment you use.

1. Protests

• View the “Resistance” photo essay by David Moore .

A great idea for photo essays for students is to shoot the protest to show its power. You can capture people with signs and banners to demonstrate what they are standing for. Besides, you can learn how to capture moving subjects. Use the best example of photo essay and don’t forget about angles, composition, and framing.

To create a photo essay , go up to the front and photograph the leader of the protesters walking forward. After that, go back to the end of the group to take pictures of families joining the protest. As a result, you will gain experience shooting big groups of people in motion.

2. Transformation

• View the “A Self-Portrait Every Day” photo essay by Noah Kalina .

This idea is all about capturing the way a person changes. You may take photos of a pregnant woman and then capture the same model with a child. By documenting the development of the child for several years, you can tell a great story in the form of a photo essay.

However, you can also create a photo essay about the transformation of different objects. For instance, you can create a time-lapse series to capture the history of a renovated building. While you will have to take a lot of similar photos to bring this idea to life, it will allow you to achieve an impressive result.

3. Local Event

• View the “Monday Marathon” photo essay by Quinn G. Perini .

Whether you are a resident of a large city or a small town, you can find an opportunity to visit a local event, like a marathon or a festival. This is a nice chance to follow modern photography trends and bring photo essay ideas to life.

You can capture the before-and-after stages of the event. Arrive earlier and take pictures of the preparation activities, then shoot the actual event starting with the official beginning.

Keep photographing even when the event is over and capture the cleaning up and disassembling processes.

4. Photowalk

• View the “Empty Campus” photo essay by Elise Trissel .

Explore the location where you live and find interesting objects to capture in the vicinity. Using the most interesting photo essay examples, you can decide how to make the best decisions. Don’t hurry and try to discover which angles you can use to capture the unique atmosphere of each place.

If you live in the city, you may capture architectural details, wide shots of busy streets, or just take photos of passersby and street signs. Think about the details that make every location unique. For instance, you can try capturing reflections to see how they allow you to see the city from an unusual angle. You can find reflections everywhere, so be sure to pay attention to mirrored buildings, puddles, and fountains.

5. Place Over Time

• View the “At Home in the Ozarks” photo essay by Kylee Cole .

If you want to document changes and show how the streets, buildings, and parks in your city change over time, select your favorite locations and start to visit them regularly to capture the way they look during different seasons.

• View the “Last Moments” photo essay by Ross Taylor .

You don’t necessarily have to focus on profound photo essay topics to evoke emotions. Capturing pets enjoying their worry-free and untroubled life seems like an easy but interesting activity.

Choose any animal – from a domestic bird to a dog, cat, or horse. For more emotional images, use such pet photography ideas when your pet is still a baby and recreate these shots when it is older or is in its final days.

7. Street Style

• View the Tribal Street Photography photo essay by Hans Eijkelboom .

People often express themselves with the help of clothes. The way passers-by on the streets are dressed may reflect the clothing style of a whole society. That’s why you can travel around the world and capture people’s outfits in various areas. When taking portrait photos in the streets, you can also include some of the surroundings to put them in the context.

You can ask people in the streets to pose for you or try to capture them in movement. Select a suitable location for taking photos and create a photo essay to document what kinds of people one can meet in this location. When doing urban photography , you should ask people for permission before taking photos of them. You can ask their contacts and send them your photos later.

8. Abandoned Building

• View the “Lost Collective” photo essay by Bret Pattman .

Old buildings are excellent architecture photography essay topics for students since you can capture a large number of elements. They allow you to imagine what a particular street looked like in the past. You may use a photo essay example for students as references.

Get approval before going in, but mind that such places are far from being totally safe. Bring various lenses: the macro lenses – for details and the wide-angle one – when you want to include many elements in one shot.

9. Alternative Lifestyles

• View the “Last Nomad Hippies” photo essay by Roberto Palomo .

Some people decide to lead a lifestyle that differs from the one generally accepted by society. Explore different areas and look for people with an unusual way of living. You can capture candid photos of regular people or take pictures of a person with an unusual hobby.

Take pictures of those, who reside in extraordinary conditions, representatives of various subcultures, or the LBGTQ community. These photo essay topics show other people that it is okay to go out of their comfort zone and run against the wind.

10. Social Issues

• View the “Juveniles in Prison” photo essay by Isadora Kosofsky .

The best photo essay examples for students are related to social issues, like unemployment, domestic violence, gender discrimination, and more. Address the topic carefully and look for a proper perspective.

Your shots may draw the people’s attention to a truly burning and relevant matter and have a stronger effect than any text.

11. Behind the Scenes

• View the “Follow Me” photo essay by Marius Masalar .

If you are going to visit an event, get ready to take some behind-the-scenes photos. For instance, you can document the preparations for a festival. Capture the work of the lead event planner and other professionals to tell the story of the festival from an unusual angle.

Alternatively, you can capture the events happening backstage during a drama production. Take pictures of actors and actresses when they are getting ready for the performance. Try capturing the emotions of the main lead and show how stage workers make final preparations. You can also document the work of designers and makeup professionals.

12. Landmarks

• View the “Volte-Face” photo essay by Oliver Curtis .

The pictures of landmarks are typically taken from a certain spot. One of the best photo essay ideas is to try shooting sights from various angles. You will also have an opportunity to improve your composition and your framing skills.

If you take a look at any pictorial essay example, you will see that the variety of perspectives is endless: through the streets, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, with a drone or including reflections.

    • View the “Family” photo essay by Olivia Moore .

You can capture the way family members interact with each other and demonstrate the strong connection they share. In some cases, it makes sense to focus on capturing candid photos when doing family photography .

However, you may also opt for a different approach and focus on more difficult social topics. For instance, if you want to examine the issue of immigration, you can take pictures of a family from another country. In addition, you may show how families cope with other social issues, including poverty or unequal access to healthcare.

14. A Day in the Life

• View the “A Day in the Life of Carlos Gaytan” photo essay by Sandy Noto .

One of the best photo essays concepts is related to a day in a person’s life. The main character can be any person – a relative, family member, teacher, writer, or policeman.

People are generally interested in finding out facts about the lives and daily routines of others. The life of every human is incredible, especially if you learn it in more detail. This idea is especially suitable for taking documentary photos. For instance, you can select any photo essay sample you like and then capture a portrait of a person with the tools they use for their work.

15. Education

• View the “School Day” photo essay by Nancy Borowick .

You can also take great photos in the classroom capturing the interactions of teachers and their students. Avoid distracting them, as it will be easier for you to take natural shots. Using a variety of settings, you can make your photo essay more engaging. For instance, you may visit chemistry labs, capture teachers during a break, and take photos in other locations.

• View the “Meals From the Motherland” photo essay by James Tran .

You can also focus on specific meals to create a professional photo essay about food. To make it more attention-grabbing, try using different food photography ideas .

For instance, you can take photos of popular meals, capture the meals made by a specific person, or document cooking traditions in different countries. When taking photos in a restaurant, pay attention to the surroundings as well to capture the unique atmosphere of a place.

17. Capture the Neighbors

• View the “Our Neighbors” photo essay by Jeanne Martin .

Regardless of the place where you live, you have to establish good relationships with your neighbors. People who live nearby can also be great models for professionals who specialize in portrait photography. To implement this idea, make sure to capture people at home or in front of their houses to include some of the surroundings in your photo essay.

You will discover many interesting facts about people who live nearby. Shooting a photo essay will allow you to learn them better and establish a strong connection with them. This way, you can create a sense of community and discover what holds its members together.

18. Climate Change

• View the “Effects of Climate Change” photo essay by Sanya Gupta .

It is possible to a variety of photo story ideas bring to life examining the impact of climate change. Travel to places most affected by climate change, for instance, glaciers or famous resorts.

Capture the way the continuous drought has influenced the environment, animals, and the inhabitants. As an alternative, take pictures of environmentalist protests or inexhaustible energy sources.

Photo Essay Tips for Students

Explore your topic . An in-depth exploration of the main topic of your photo essay will help you find the best ideas for conveying your message. You can also find some sources for inspiration and useful materials. This stage allows you to learn more about your subject and select the best way of organizing your photo essay.

Create a storyboard . Using a storyboard, you can better understand what shots you need to take and what order can help you to tell a story in the best way. It will also allow you to create the right mood.

Take as many pictures as you can . To create a compelling story, make sure to take a lot of photos. It will allow you to choose the best pictures for your photo essay. Besides, you will always have backup photos if some of your pictures get damaged.

Experiment with different techniques . By changing the angle and using a variety of editing techniques, you can transform the way your photos look. When taking photos, try using different angles to capture the subject in the best way. You can also try changing the distance from the model, using black-and-white film, or employing a range of developing methods.

Add text . While some photographers create photo essays without text, it can still help you bring your point across more clearly and make it easier for a viewer to understand what you imply. By providing extra information, such as some facts, you can change the perception of your image. If you don’t know how to write descriptions, you can hire a professional writer to perform this task.

Enhance your photos . To edit your pictures, make sure to use professional photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Using the available tools, you can improve and change your photos. They allow you to fix issues with lighting, adjust WB, make colors richer, crop your pics to improve the composition, and perform other tasks. In case you need to edit your photos in a consistent style, you can use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets.

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The Year of Endurance

Hope and uncertainty amid a pandemic that wouldn’t end.

In 2021, the pandemic forced us all to think hard about who we do and don’t trust

Introduction by david rowell.

As a nation, we are supposed to be built around trust. Look at the back of the bills in your wallet. “In God We Trust.”

Trust the system.

Trust yourself.

Trust but verify.

Trust your instincts.

Love may be the emotion we like to think ultimately propels us, but it’s trust that informs how we go about our daily lives. And yet. Our level of trust, our very foundation, has been crumbling for a long time now. Scandals, abuse and corruption in the major pillars of our society — religious institutions, education, business, military, government, health care, law enforcement, even the sports world — have made us a wary people.

When the pandemic came, first as murmurs that were easy to tune out, then as an unbounded crisis we couldn’t tune into enough, our relationship to trust was newly infected with something we didn’t fully understand. And before long, who and what we trusted — or didn’t — in the form of elected leaders, scientists and doctors became one more cause of death here and all over the world. In this way, distrust was a kind of pandemic itself: widely contagious and passed by the mouth.

As the first American casualties of covid-19 were announced, President Trump kept insisting it would disappear “with the heat” or “at the end of the month” or “without a vaccine.” Like a disgraced, fringe science teacher, he entertained this idea at one coronavirus news conference: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” With leadership like this, the country was receiving an injection — of chaos.

The pandemic ripped through the rest of 2020, and America was not only more splintered than ever, but also a dangerous place to be. Some politicians declared to the public, “I trust the science,” as if that were an unprecedented and heroic stance.

As we navigated our way into 2021, questions about what to believe led — painfully and predictably — to doubts about the most reliable way we had to stay safe: wearing masks. With the return to schools looming, the debate about masks and children — masks as protectors, or masks as educational folly — played out like a plague of rants. No one seemed to trust others to do the right thing anymore, whatever that was. By summer’s end, trust felt like the latest variant to avoid.

Trust takes lots of forms, but can we actually see it in a photograph the way we can identify a cloud or a wave, or an overt moment of joy or sadness? The photo essays that follow capture a full tableau of human responses in year two of the pandemic — trepidation, but also a sense of renewal; celebration, but caution as well. And despite rancor and confusion still being in as steady supply as the vaccine itself, the permutations of trust have their own presence here, too, if we’re open enough to seeing them.

When Jay Wescott went on tour with rock band Candlebox, he was documenting one of the many performing acts that returned to the road this summer, after the long hiatus. On tour there’s a lot variables you can control, and just as many, if not more, that you can’t — and in the time of covid, control and trust form their own essential but perilous interplay. The picture of the band’s drummer, Robin Diaz, who is vaccinated but unmasked, setting up his kit in such proximity to road manager Carlos Novais, vaccinated and masked, not only captures that still-odd dynamic that goes into making any live performance happen right now; it is also a welcome contrast to all the images of masked and unmasked protesters screaming at each other about what and whom to trust. On tour with Candlebox, Westcott observed how trust is carrying the band forward, creating harmonies on and off the stage.

Much farther away, in Michael Robinson Chavez’s pictures from Sicily, we bear witness to religious celebrations as part of saint’s days, which were canceled last year because of the pandemic. The celebrations resumed, though stripped down, this September, with vaccines readily available, but then, as Chavez notes, the people of Sicily were vaccinated at lower numbers than those in other regions of the country. In one image, we see a tuba player, his mask down below his chin as he blows his notes out into the world. Behind him are masked adults and maskless children. And, perhaps all through the festival, a trust in God to watch over them.

Lucía Vázquez trained her lens on the eager crowds of young women who descended upon Miami, a city known for its own style of carnival-type celebrations, though decidedly less holy ones. These women have left masks out of their outfits and are trusting something not quite scientific and not quite political, but more personal: their guts. Such a calculation comes down to a conviction that either you won’t get the coronavirus, or, if you do, you’ll survive. It means placing a lot of trust in yourself.

As a visual meditation, the pictures in this issue offer a portrait of a historical moment in which trust and distrust have defined us. Ultimately, the photographs that follow, reflecting various realities of the pandemic, are tinted with hope that we can reclaim our lives. Not exactly as they were in the past, but in a way that still resembles how we had once imagined them for the future. These images remind us that even in our fractured, confused and suffering world, it remains possible that where we can find trust again, we can be healed.

Ready to Rock

Unmasked fans and mayflies: on tour with the band candlebox, text and photographs by jay westcott.

I n February 2020, after a dear friend passed away (not from covid), all I could think about was getting on the road with a band so I could lose myself in the work and create something that would bring joy to people. The world had other plans, though.

Sixteen months later, I headed out on tour with Candlebox. Almost 30 years has passed since the Seattle hard-rock group released its debut album and saw it sell more than 4 million copies. Frontman Kevin Martin and his current lineup invited me along to document the first part of their tour. I packed up my gear, drove west, and met the band at Soundcheck, a rehearsal and gear storage facility in Nashville, as they prepared for the tour.

Whenever people learn that I photograph musicians, inevitably they ask me what it’s like on a tour bus. I tell people it’s like camping with your co-workers from the office where you all sleep in the same tent. For weeks on end. That sours their midlife fantasies about digging out that guitar from the garage and hitting the road to become a rock star.

The people who do tour and play music, build the sets, mix the sound, sell the merch and lug the gear night after night are some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met. They are a special breed of artists, deep thinkers, poets, masters of their instruments. Music has the ability to make you move and stop you in your tracks, to change your mood, make you smile, cry, think. The goal is the same: Put on a great show. Every night. Play like it could be your last show.

It’s easy to sit back and armchair quarterback on social media about the risks of holding festivals and rock concerts amid the pandemic, but this is what people do for a living. Few people buy albums or CDs or even download music anymore. It’s all about streaming and grabbing viewers on social media now. Touring and merch sales are about the only way musicians have to make money these days. Music is meant to be performed in front of people, a shared experience. With everybody on the bus vaccinated and ready to go, we headed to Louisville for the first of a 49-show run.

The crowd of mostly older millennials and GenXers were ready for a rock show. They knew all the words to the hits in the set — especially Candlebox’s mega-hit from the ’90s, “Far Behind” — and were into the band’s new songs too. It felt good. Then came the mayflies, in massive swarms.

The next stop on the tour was a festival along the Mississippi River in Iowa. I was up early, and as soon as we pulled in you could see mayflies dancing in the air all around us. As the day wore on, the flies intensified, and by nightfall any kind of light revealed hundreds upon hundreds of them, dancing in their own way like the crowd of unmasked fans below them. Also there were Confederate flags everywhere. Boats tied together on the river flew Trump flags in the warm summer breeze.

I was asleep when we crossed the river and made our way to St. Louis, the third stop on the tour and my last with the band. A great crowd: Close your eyes and you can easily picture yourself at Woodstock ’94. But it’s 2021 and Kevin Martin and company are still here.

Jay Westcott is a photographer in Arlington.

‘He Gave Me Life’

A cuban single mother reflects on isolation with her son, text and photographs by natalia favre.

S ingle mother Ara Santana Romero, 30, and her 11-year-old son, Camilo, have spent the past year and a half practically isolated in their Havana apartment. Just before the pandemic started, Camilo had achieved his biggest dream, getting accepted into music school. Two weeks after classes began, the schools closed and his classes were only televised. A return to the classroom was expected for mid-November, at which point all the children were scheduled to be vaccinated. According to a UNICEF analysis, since the beginning of the pandemic, 139 million children around the world have lived under compulsory home confinement for at least nine months.

Before the pandemic, Ara had undertaken several projects organizing literary events for students. After Havana went into quarantine and Camilo had to stay home, her days consisted mainly of getting food, looking after her son and doing housework. As a single mother with no help, she has put aside her wishes and aspirations. But Ara told me she never regretted having her son: “He gave me life.”

Natalia Favre is a photographer based in Havana.

Life After War in Gaza

A healing period of picnics, weddings and vaccinations, text and photographs by salwan georges.

A s I went from Israel into the Gaza Strip, I realized I was the only person crossing the border checkpoint that day. But I immediately saw that streets were vibrant with people shopping and wending through heavy traffic. There are hardly any working traffic lights in Gaza City, so drivers wave their hands out their windows to alert others to let them pass.

Despite the liveliness, recent trauma lingered in the air: In May, Israeli airstrikes destroyed several buildings and at least 264 Palestinians died. The fighting came after thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, where at least 16 people died. Workers were still cleaning up when I visited in late August, some of them recycling rubble — such as metal from foundations — to use for rebuilding.

I visited the city of Beit Hanoun, which was heavily damaged. I met Ibrahim, whose apartment was nearly destroyed, and as I looked out from a hole in his living room, I saw children gathered to play a game. Nearby there is a sports complex next to a school. Young people were playing soccer.

Back in Gaza City, families come every night to Union Soldier Park to eat, shop and play. Children and their parents were awaiting their turn to pay for a ride on an electric bike decorated with LED lights. In another part of town, not too far away, the bazaar and the markets were filled ahead of the weekend.

The beach in Gaza City is the most popular destination for locals, particularly because the Israeli government, which occupies the territory, generally does not allow them to leave Gaza. Families picnicked in the late afternoon and then stayed to watch their kids swim until after sunset. One of the local traditions when someone gets married is to parade down the middle of a beachfront road so the groom can dance with relatives and friends.

Amid the activities, I noticed that many people were not wearing face coverings, and I learned that the coronavirus vaccination rate is low. The health department started placing posters around the city to urge vaccination and set up a weekly lottery to award money to those who get immunized.

I also attended the funeral of a boy named Omar Abu al-Nil, who was wounded by the Israeli army — probably by a bullet — during one of the frequent protests at the border. He later died at the hospital from his wounds. More than 100 people attended, mainly men. They carried Omar to the cemetery and buried him as his father watched.

Salwan Georges is a Washington Post staff photographer.

Beyond the Numbers

At home, i constructed a photo diary to show the pandemic’s human toll, text and photographs by beth galton.

I n March 2020, while the coronavirus began its universal spread, my world in New York City became my apartment. I knew that to keep safe I wouldn’t be able to access my studio, so I brought my camera home and constructed a small studio next to a window.

I began my days looking at the New York Times and The Washington Post online, hoping to find a glimmer of positive news. What I found and became obsessed with were the maps, charts and headlines, all of which were tracking the coronavirus’s spread. I printed them out to see how the disease had multiplied and moved, soon realizing that each of these little visual changes affected millions of people. With time, photographs of people who had died began to appear in the news. Grids of faces filled the screen; many died alone, without family or friends beside them.

This series reflects my emotions and thoughts through the past year and a half. By photographing data and images, combined with botanicals, my intent was to speak to the humanity of those affected by this pandemic. I used motion in the images to help convey the chaos and apprehensions we were all experiencing. I now see that this assemblage is a visual diary of my life during the pandemic.

Beth Galton is a photographer in New York.

Finding Hope in Seclusion

A self-described sickle cell warrior must stay home to keep safe, text and photographs by endia beal.

O nyekachukwu Onochie, who goes by Onyeka, is a 28-year-old African American woman born with sickle cell anemia. She describes herself as a sickle cell warrior who lives each day like it’s her last. “When I was younger,” she told me, “I thought I would live until my mid-20s because I knew other people with sickle cell that died in their 20s.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes sickle cell anemia as an inherited red blood cell disorder that causes those cells to become hard and sticky, and appear C-shaped. Healthy red blood cells are round and move through small blood vessels to carry oxygen, whereas sickle cells die earlier and transport less oxygen. The disorder can cause debilitating pain and organ failure.

In June 2020, Onyeka began preparing her body for a stem cell transplant — a new treatment — and underwent the procedure in April. She is now home in Winston-Salem, N.C., recovering from the transplant. Despite the positive results thus far, Onyeka’s immune system is compromised and she is at greater risk of severe illness or death from viruses.

I asked about her life during the pandemic. She told me: “My new normal includes video chat lunch dates. I have more energy now than ever before, but I have to stay indoors to protect myself from airborne viruses, among other things.” Onyeka believes she has been given a new life with endless possibilities — even though she is temporarily homebound.

Endia Beal is an artist based in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Baker’s Choice

A fun-loving, self-taught baker decides to open her shop despite the pandemic, text and photographs by marvin joseph.

T iffany Lightfoot is the owner and founder of My Cake Theory, where she merges her love of fashion with her gifts as a baker. Undaunted by the pandemic, she opened her first brick-and-mortar shop on Capitol Hill last year. Lightfoot, 41, combined the skills she learned as a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology with dozens of hours watching the Food Network and YouTube videos — and spun her self-taught baking into a business. With these photographs I wanted to show how much fun she has baking — while building a career she clearly loves.

Marvin Joseph is a Washington Post staff photographer.

Leap of Faith

Despite low vaccination rates, sicilians resume religious parades, text and photographs by michael robinson chavez.

T he island of Sicily has been overrun and conquered by numerous empires and civilizations. The year 2020 brought a new and deadly conqueror, the coronavirus. The lockdown was absolute — even church doors were shut tight. But in 2021, Sicilians brought life and traditions back to their streets.

Saint’s days, or festas, are important events on the Sicilian calendar. Last year, for the first time in more than a century, some towns canceled their festas. The arrival of vaccines this year seemed to offer hope that the processions would once again march down the ancient streets. However, a surge in summer tourism, while helping the local economy, also boosted the coronavirus infection rate.

Sicily has the lowest vaccination rate in Italy. Nevertheless, scaled-down celebrations have reappeared in the island’s streets. In the capital city of Palermo, residents gathered for the festa honoring the Maria della Mercede (Madonna of Mercy), which dates to the 16th century. Children were hoisted aloft to be blessed by the Virgin as a marching band played in a small piazza fronting the church that bears her name. Local bishops did not permit the normal procession because of the pandemic, so local children had their own, carrying a cardboard re-creation of the Virgin through the labyrinth of the famous Il Capo district’s narrow streets.

As the fireworks blossomed overhead and the marching band played on, it was easy to see that Sicilians were embracing a centuries-old tradition that seems certain to last for many more to come.

Michael Robinson Chavez is a Washington Post staff photographer.

Defiant Glamour

After long months of covid confinement, a fearless return to 2019 in miami beach, text and photographs by lucía vázquez.

O n Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive I’ve seen drunk girls hitting other drunk girls, and I’ve seen men high on whatever they could afford, zombie-walking with their mouths and eyes wide open amid the tourists. I’ve seen partyers sprawled on the pavement just a few feet from the Villa Casa Casuarina, the former Versace mansion.

I’ve seen groups of women wearing fake eyelashes as long and thick as a broom, and flashing miniature bras, and smoking marijuana by a palm tree in the park, next to families going to the beach. I’ve seen five girls standing on the back of a white open-air Jeep twerking in their underwear toward the street.

My photographs, taken in August, capture South Beach immersed in this untamed party mood with the menace of the delta variant as backdrop. They document young women enjoying the summer after more than a year of confinement. Traveling from around the country, they made the most of their return to social life by showing off their style and skin, wearing their boldest party attire. I was drawn to the fearlessness of their outfits and their confidence; I wanted to show how these women identify themselves and wish to be perceived, a year and a half after covid-19 changed the world.

Lucía Vázquez is a journalist and photographer based in New York and Buenos Aires.

A Giving Spirit

‘this pandemic has taught me to be even closer to my family and friends’, text and photographs by octavio jones.

M arlise Tolbert-Jones, who works part time for an air conditioning company in Tampa, spends most of her time caring for her 91-year-old father, Rudolph Tolbert, and her aunt Frances Pascoe, who is 89. Marlise visits them daily to make sure they’re eating a good breakfast and taking their medications. In addition to being a caregiver, Marlise, 57, volunteers for a local nonprofit food pantry, where she helps distribute groceries for families. Also, she volunteers at her church’s food pantry, where food is distributed every Saturday morning.

“I’m doing this because of my [late] mother, who would want me to be there for the family and the community,” she told me. “I’ve had my struggles. I’ve been down before, but God has just kept me stable and given me the strength to keep going. This pandemic has taught me to be even closer to my family and friends.”

Octavio Jones is an independent photojournalist based in Tampa.

First, people paused. Then they took stock. Then they persevered.

Text and photographs by anastassia whitty.

W e all know the pandemic has challenged people and altered daily routines. I created this photo essay to highlight the perspectives and experiences of everyday people, specifically African Americans: What does their “new normal” look like? I also wanted to demonstrate how they were able to persevere. One such person is Maria J. Hackett, 30, a Brooklyn photographer, dancer and mother of a daughter, NiNi. Both are featured on the cover.

I asked Maria her thoughts on what the pandemic has meant for her. “Quarantine opened up an opportunity to live in a way that was more healthy while taking on much-needed deep healing,” she told me. “It was my mental and emotional health that began breaking me down physically. ... I put things to a stop as my health began to deteriorate. I decided I will no longer chase money — but stay true to my art, plan and trust that things will come together in a healthier way for us. I focused more on letting my daughter guide us and on her remaining happy with her activities and social life.”

“Enrolling her in camps and classes like dance and gymnastics led me to develop a schedule and routine,” Maria explained, “opening room for me to complete my first dance residency in my return to exploration of movement. I made time to share what I know with her and what she knows with me.”

Jasmine Hamilton of Long Island, 32, talked in similiar terms. She too became more focused on mental health and fitness. She told me: “The pandemic has demonstrated that life is short and valuable, so I’m more open to creating new experiences.”

Anastassia Whitty is a photographer based in New York.

About this story

Photo editing by Dudley M. Brooks and Chloe Coleman. Design and development by Audrey Valbuena. Design editing by Suzette Moyer and Christian Font. Editing by Rich Leiby. Copy editing by Jennifer Abella and Angie Wu.

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How to Create an Engaging Photo Essay (with Examples)

Photo essays tell a story in pictures. They're a great way to improve at photography and story-telling skills at once. Learn how to do create a great one.

Learn | Photography Guides | By Ana Mireles

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Photography is a medium used to tell stories – sometimes they are told in one picture, sometimes you need a whole series. Those series can be photo essays.

If you’ve never done a photo essay before, or you’re simply struggling to find your next project, this article will be of help. I’ll be showing you what a photo essay is and how to go about doing one.

You’ll also find plenty of photo essay ideas and some famous photo essay examples from recent times that will serve you as inspiration.

If you’re ready to get started, let’s jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a series of images that share an overarching theme as well as a visual and technical coherence to tell a story. Some people refer to a photo essay as a photo series or a photo story – this often happens in photography competitions.

Photographic history is full of famous photo essays. Think about The Great Depression by Dorothea Lange, Like Brother Like Sister by Wolfgang Tillmans, Gandhi’s funeral by Henri Cartier Bresson, amongst others.

What are the types of photo essay?

Despite popular belief, the type of photo essay doesn’t depend on the type of photography that you do – in other words, journalism, documentary, fine art, or any other photographic genre is not a type of photo essay.

Instead, there are two main types of photo essays: narrative and thematic .

As you have probably already guessed, the thematic one presents images pulled together by a topic – for example, global warming. The images can be about animals and nature as well as natural disasters devastating cities. They can happen all over the world or in the same location, and they can be captured in different moments in time – there’s a lot of flexibility.

A narrative photo essa y, on the other hand, tells the story of a character (human or not), portraying a place or an event. For example, a narrative photo essay on coffee would document the process from the planting and harvesting – to the roasting and grinding until it reaches your morning cup.

What are some of the key elements of a photo essay?

• Tell a unique story – A unique story doesn’t mean that you have to photograph something that nobody has done before – that would be almost impossible! It means that you should consider what you’re bringing to the table on a particular topic.
• Put yourself into the work – One of the best ways to make a compelling photo essay is by adding your point of view, which can only be done with your life experiences and the way you see the world.
• Add depth to the concept – The best photo essays are the ones that go past the obvious and dig deeper in the story, going behind the scenes, or examining a day in the life of the subject matter – that’s what pulls in the spectator.
• Nail the technique – Even if the concept and the story are the most important part of a photo essay, it won’t have the same success if it’s poorly executed.
• Build a structure – A photo essay is about telling a thought-provoking story – so, think about it in a narrative way. Which images are going to introduce the topic? Which ones represent a climax? How is it going to end – how do you want the viewer to feel after seeing your photo series?
• Make strong choices – If you really want to convey an emotion and a unique point of view, you’re going to need to make some hard decisions. Which light are you using? Which lens? How many images will there be in the series? etc., and most importantly for a great photo essay is the why behind those choices.

9 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

Credit: Laura James

1. Choose something you know

To make a good photo essay, you don’t need to travel to an exotic location or document a civil war – I mean, it’s great if you can, but you can start close to home.

Depending on the type of photography you do and the topic you’re looking for in your photographic essay, you can photograph a local event or visit an abandoned building outside your town.

It will be much easier for you to find a unique perspective and tell a better story if you’re already familiar with the subject. Also, consider that you might have to return a few times to the same location to get all the photos you need.

2. Follow your passion

Most photo essays take dedication and passion. If you choose a subject that might be easy, but you’re not really into it – the results won’t be as exciting. Taking photos will always be easier and more fun if you’re covering something you’re passionate about.

3. Take your time

A great photo essay is not done in a few hours. You need to put in the time to research it, conceptualizing it, editing, etc. That’s why I previously recommended following your passion because it takes a lot of dedication, and if you’re not passionate about it – it’s difficult to push through.

4. Write a summary or statement

Photo essays are always accompanied by some text. You can do this in the form of an introduction, write captions for each photo or write it as a conclusion. That’s up to you and how you want to present the work.

5. Learn from the masters

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Making a photographic essay takes a lot of practice and knowledge. A great way to become a better photographer and improve your storytelling skills is by studying the work of others. You can go to art shows, review books and magazines and look at the winners in photo contests – most of the time, there’s a category for photo series.

6. Get a wide variety of photos

Think about a story – a literary one. It usually tells you where the story is happening, who is the main character, and it gives you a few details to make you engage with it, right?

The same thing happens with a visual story in a photo essay – you can do some wide-angle shots to establish the scenes and some close-ups to show the details. Make a shot list to ensure you cover all the different angles.

Some of your pictures should guide the viewer in, while others are more climatic and regard the experience they are taking out of your photos.

7. Follow a consistent look

Both in style and aesthetics, all the images in your series need to be coherent. You can achieve this in different ways, from the choice of lighting, the mood, the post-processing, etc.

8. Be self-critical

Once you have all the photos, make sure you edit them with a good dose of self-criticism. Not all the pictures that you took belong in the photo essay. Choose only the best ones and make sure they tell the full story.

9. Ask for constructive feedback

Often, when we’re working on a photo essay project for a long time, everything makes perfect sense in our heads. However, someone outside the project might not be getting the idea. It’s important that you get honest and constructive criticism to improve your photography.

How to Create a Photo Essay in 5 Steps

Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh

1. Choose your topic

This is the first step that you need to take to decide if your photo essay is going to be narrative or thematic. Then, choose what is it going to be about?

Ideally, it should be something that you’re interested in, that you have something to say about it, and it can connect with other people.

2. Research your topic

To tell a good story about something, you need to be familiar with that something. This is especially true when you want to go deeper and make a compelling photo essay. Day in the life photo essays are a popular choice, since often, these can be performed with friends and family, whom you already should know well.

3. Plan your photoshoot

Depending on what you’re photographing, this step can be very different from one project to the next. For a fine art project, you might need to find a location, props, models, a shot list, etc., while a documentary photo essay is about planning the best time to do the photos, what gear to bring with you, finding a local guide, etc.

Every photo essay will need different planning, so before taking pictures, put in the required time to get things right.

4. Experiment

It’s one thing to plan your photo shoot and having a shot list that you have to get, or else the photo essay won’t be complete. It’s another thing to miss out on some amazing photo opportunities that you couldn’t foresee.

So, be prepared but also stay open-minded and experiment with different settings, different perspectives, etc.

5. Make a final selection

Editing your work can be one of the hardest parts of doing a photo essay. Sometimes we can be overly critical, and others, we get attached to bad photos because we put a lot of effort into them or we had a great time doing them.

Try to be as objective as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for opinions and make various revisions before settling down on a final cut.

7 Photo Essay Topics, Ideas & Examples

Credit: Michelle Leman

• Architectural photo essay

Using architecture as your main subject, there are tons of photo essay ideas that you can do. For some inspiration, you can check out the work of Francisco Marin – who was trained as an architect and then turned to photography to “explore a different way to perceive things”.

You can also lookup Luisa Lambri. Amongst her series, you’ll find many photo essay examples in which architecture is the subject she uses to explore the relationship between photography and space.

• Process and transformation photo essay

This is one of the best photo essay topics for beginners because the story tells itself. Pick something that has a beginning and an end, for example, pregnancy, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the life-cycle of a plant, etc.

Keep in mind that these topics are linear and give you an easy way into the narrative flow – however, it might be difficult to find an interesting perspective and a unique point of view.

• A day in the life of ‘X’ photo essay

There are tons of interesting photo essay ideas in this category – you can follow around a celebrity, a worker, your child, etc. You don’t even have to do it about a human subject – think about doing a photo essay about a day in the life of a racing horse, for example – find something that’s interesting for you.

• Time passing by photo essay

It can be a natural site or a landmark photo essay – whatever is close to you will work best as you’ll need to come back multiple times to capture time passing by. For example, how this place changes throughout the seasons or maybe even over the years.

A fun option if you live with family is to document a birthday party each year, seeing how the subject changes over time. This can be combined with a transformation essay or sorts, documenting the changes in interpersonal relationships over time.

• Travel photo essay

Do you want to make the jump from tourist snapshots into a travel photo essay? Research the place you’re going to be travelling to. Then, choose a topic.

If you’re having trouble with how to do this, check out any travel magazine – National Geographic, for example. They won’t do a generic article about Texas – they do an article about the beach life on the Texas Gulf Coast and another one about the diverse flavors of Texas.

The more specific you get, the deeper you can go with the story.

• Socio-political issues photo essay

This is one of the most popular photo essay examples – it falls under the category of photojournalism or documental photography. They are usually thematic, although it’s also possible to do a narrative one.

Depending on your topic of interest, you can choose topics that involve nature – for example, document the effects of global warming. Another idea is to photograph protests or make an education photo essay.

It doesn’t have to be a big global issue; you can choose something specific to your community – are there too many stray dogs? Make a photo essay about a local animal shelter. The topics are endless.

• Behind the scenes photo essay

A behind-the-scenes always make for a good photo story – people are curious to know what happens and how everything comes together before a show.

Depending on your own interests, this can be a photo essay about a fashion show, a theatre play, a concert, and so on. You’ll probably need to get some permissions, though, not only to shoot but also to showcase or publish those images.

4 Best Photo Essays in Recent times

Now that you know all the techniques about it, it might be helpful to look at some photo essay examples to see how you can put the concept into practice. Here are some famous photo essays from recent times to give you some inspiration.

Habibi by Antonio Faccilongo

This photo essay wan the World Press Photo Story of the Year in 2021. Faccilongo explores a very big conflict from a very specific and intimate point of view – how the Israeli-Palestinian war affects the families.

He chose to use a square format because it allows him to give order to things and eliminate unnecessary elements in his pictures.

With this long-term photo essay, he wanted to highlight the sense of absence and melancholy women and families feel towards their husbands away at war.

The project then became a book edited by Sarah Leen and the graphics of Ramon Pez.

Picture This: New Orleans by Mary Ellen Mark

The last assignment before her passing, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to New Orleans to register the city after a decade after Hurricane Katrina.

The images of the project “bring to life the rebirth and resilience of the people at the heart of this tale”, – says CNNMoney, commissioner of the work.

Each survivor of the hurricane has a story, and Mary Ellen Mark was there to record it. Some of them have heartbreaking stories about everything they had to leave behind.

Others have a story of hope – like Sam and Ben, two eight-year-olds born from frozen embryos kept in a hospital that lost power supply during the hurricane, yet they managed to survive.

Selfie by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer whose work is mainly done through self-portraits. With them, she explores the concept of identity, gender stereotypes, as well as visual and cultural codes.

One of her latest photo essays was a collaboration with W Magazine entitled Selfie. In it, the author explores the concept of planned candid photos (‘plandid’).

The work was made for Instagram, as the platform is well known for the conflict between the ‘real self’ and the one people present online. Sherman started using Facetune, Perfect365 and YouCam to alter her appearance on selfies – in Photoshop, you can modify everything, but these apps were designed specifically to “make things prettier”- she says, and that’s what she wants to explore in this photo essay.

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf has an interest in the broad-gauge topic Life in Cities. From there, many photo essays have been derived – amongst them – Tokyo Compression .

He was horrified by the way people in Tokyo are forced to move to the suburbs because of the high prices of the city. Therefore, they are required to make long commutes facing 1,5 hours of train to start their 8+ hour workday followed by another 1,5 hours to get back home.

To portray this way of life, he photographed the people inside the train pressed against the windows looking exhausted, angry or simply absent due to this way of life.

You can visit his website to see other photo essays that revolve around the topic of life in megacities.

Final Words

It’s not easy to make photo essays, so don’t expect to be great at it right from your first project.

Start off small by choosing a specific subject that’s interesting to you –  that will come from an honest place, and it will be a great practice for some bigger projects along the line.

Whether you like to shoot still life or you’re a travel photographer, I hope these photo essay tips and photo essay examples can help you get started and grow in your photography.

Let us know which topics you are working on right now – we’ll love to hear from you!

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Ana Mireles is a Mexican researcher that specializes in photography and communications for the arts and culture sector.

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Ten examples of immersive photo essays

By Marissa Sapega — Contributing Writer

Photo essays are one of the most powerful forms of storytelling in the last century. From the great depression photographer W. Eugene Smith to the photojournalism of National Geographic or Life Magazine , the best photo essays entertain, educate, and move readers more than words alone ever could. 

But photo essays have changed. Over the last decade, web publishing technologies — including web browsers and file formats — have improved by leaps and bounds. A good photo essays today is more than a collection of images. It’s a truly interactive, immersive, and multimedia experiences.

In this guide, we introduce 10 stunning examples of visually arresting interactive photo essays to fuel your creative juices.

Now, let's set the scene with a short introduction to immersive, interactive photo essays on the web.

What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin have in common? They craft stunning, interactive web content with Shorthand. And so can you! Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required. Sign up now.

The rise of immersive, interactive photo essays

What is an immersive, interactive photo essay? Let's take these terms one at a time. 

An immersive photo essay uses rich media and story design to capture and keep the reader's attention. Immersive content is typically free of the most distracting elements of the web, such as pop-ups, skyscrapers, and other intrusions on the reading experience.

As a basic rule of thumb, immersive content respects the reader's attention. 

An interactive photo essay is one that allows the reader to control how the content appears. It may include interactive elements, like maps and embedded applications.

More commonly, modern interactive photo stories use a technique known as scrollytelling . Scrollytelling stories allow the reader to trigger animations and other visual effects as they scroll. Many of the examples in this guide use scrollytelling techniques. Read more scrollytelling examples .

Until relatively recently, immersive, interactive photo essays could only be created with the help of a designer or web developer. But with the rise of digital storytelling platforms , anyone can create compelling, dynamic stories without writing a single line of code.

If you're looking to learn more about how to create a photo essay — or are looking for more photo essay ideas  — check out our introduction to photo essays . 

Photo essay topics

If you’re looking for photo essay examples, chances are you’re looking to create a photo essay for yourself. If you’re just getting started, you might want some guidance on exactly what kinds of topics make for great photo essays.

More experienced photographers — feel free to skip this section. But for those who are just starting out, here’s a quick list of classic photo essay subject matter, for all types of photo essays.

• Local events. A great way to start out is photograph local events in your community, such as a high school fundraiser. A bonus is that you’ll have a ready
• Historic sites. Another classic photo essay topic is an exploration of a historic site. This could be a building, a monument, or even just a specific location that has significance.
• Profile of a person. A great way to get to know someone is to profile them in a photo essay. This could be a family member, friend, or even just someone you’ve met.
• Animals in captivity. Another popular subject matter for photo essays is animals in captivity, whether that’s at a zoo or elsewhere.
• A day in the life. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live someone else’s life for a day? Why not find out and document it in a photo essay?
• Street photography. Another great way to practice your photography skills is to head out into the streets and photograph the everyday lives of people around you. The world has plenty of photo essays of cities like New York and London. But what about street photography in your own backyard?
• Still life photography. Still life photography is all about capturing inanimate objects on film. This could be anything from flowers to furniture to food. It’s a great way to practice your photography skills and learn about composition
• Landscapes . Landscape photography is one of the most popular genres, and for good reason. There are endless possibilities when it comes to finding interesting subjects to shoot. So get out there and start exploring!
• Abandoned buildings. There’s something fascinating about abandoned buildings. They offer a glimpse into the past, and can be eerily beautiful. If you have any in your area, they make for great photo essay subjects.
• Lifestyles. Document someone who lives a lifestyle that’s different from your own. This could be a portrayal of an everyday person, or it could be someone with an unusual job or hobby.
• Social issues. Take photos depicting significant social issues in your community, remembering to respect your subjects.

Ten inspiring photo essay examples

Pink lagoon and peculiar galaxies — July’s best science images

In Pink lagoon and peculiar galaxies , Nature present a mesmerising series of images from the natural world. Highlights include:

• a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it photo of rare albino orcas performing feats of synchronized swimming;
• an arresting aerial view of the aftermath of the flash floods in Germany; and,
• a scarlet gawping Venus flytrap sea anemone. 

The best part? Nature publishes similarly powerful photo essays every month, showcasing some of the best and most creative photography of the natural world anywhere on the web.

Vanishing Lands

Vanishing lands — an ominously interesting photo essay from media company Stuff — opens with a bucolic visual featuring meandering sheep flanked by breathtaking mountains that blur into obscurity.

Soon, more awe-inspiring photos of breathtaking New Zealand farmland appear, accompanied by expressive prose whose tone matches the visuals’ stark beauty.

In this unflinchingly honest photographic essay, Stuff takes the viewer behind the scenes with a day in the life of a high country sheep farmer facing an uncertain future. One stunning photo fades into the next as you scroll through, broken only by the occasional noteworthy quote and accompanying narrative.

Olympic photos: Emotion runs high

This emotionally wrought sports story from NBC begins with a close-up of an anxious Simone Biles, her expression exemplifying the tension and frustration echoed on so many of her fellow athletes’ faces.

The subtitle puts it perfectly: “The agony—and thrill—of competition at the Olympics is written all over their faces.”

Devastation, disappointment, and defeat take centre stage in this piece — but not all the subjects of the photos in this compelling photography essay depict misery. Some of the images, like that taken of the gold medal-winning Russian artistic gymnasts, manage to project the athletes’ joy almost beyond the edges of the screen.

The NBC editors who created this visual story chose to display the series of photos using the entire screen width and limit the copy to simple captions, letting the visuals speak for themselves. The result is a riveting montage of photographs that manage to capture the overarching sentiment of the 2020 Olympic Games.

James Epp: A Twist of the Hand

In A Twist of the Hand , the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge have produced a gorgeous photo essay. This online art show showcases artist James Epp’s installation, combining photographs of the exhibit with images of museum prints and authentic artefacts.

As you scroll down, close-up shots of the installation make you feel like you’re physically wandering among the ancient sculptures, able to examine hairline spider cracks and tiny divots marking the surface of every antiquated figure. In between the photos—and often flanked by museum prints—are James Epp's musings about what inspired him to create the pieces. It’s an absorbing virtual gallery that will no doubt inspire real life visits to the exhibition.

The Café Racer Revolution

Though it’s a cleverly built piece of interactive content marketing , Honda’s “ Café Racer Revolution ” is also a great photo essay. Alongside information about the latest and greatest motorcycles Honda has to offer, it details the history of the bikers who sought to employ motorcycles (specifically “café racers”) as a way to forge an identity for themselves and project a “statement of individuality.”

Scroll down, and nostalgic black-and-white photos give way to contemporary action shots featuring fully decked-out motorcyclists on various Honda models.

Dynamic photos of bikes rotate them 360 degrees when you mouse over them, and text superimposed over flashy shots rolls smoothly down the screen as you scroll. This photo essay will stir a longing to hit the open road for anyone who has ever dreamed of owning one of Honda’s zippy bikes.

Built to keep Black from white

In Built to keep Black from white , NBC News and BridgeDetroit have built a stunning narrative photo essay that encapsulates the history of Detroit’s Birwood Wall — a literal dividing line intended to separate neighborhoods inhabited by people of different races. 

The piece begins with a brief history of the concrete barrier. Between paragraphs of text, it weaves in quotes from residents who grew up as the wall was erected and a short video. Animated maps highlighting the affected neighborhoods unspool across the screen as you scroll down, accompanied by brief explanations of what the maps represent.

In the series of photographs that follow, contemporary images transition into decades-old shots of the wall when it was newly constructed. This is followed by images of original real estate documents, resident portraits, and additional animated maps — each considering the issue from different angles.

The piece ends with an interactive display of how Detroit’s racial makeup has changed over the past several decades, from majority white to black, and how the wall has impacted the lives of its residents who lived (and died) within its borders.

The story of Black Lives Matter in sport

The BBC pairs illustrations and bold imagery in this photo essay on how athletes participated in the Black Lives Matter movement . At the start, a narrow column of text leads into an iconic image of American football players kneeling during the pre-game national anthem in a solemn protest against police brutality. 

The first excerpt, a summary of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, draws you in with piercing prose capped off with photographs that bleed into one another. Every account in the photo essay follows this layout.

WaterAid Climate Stories

Climate change affects everyone on the planet, but some people are feeling the effects more than others. WaterAid’s scrollytelling photo essay illuminates the plight of individuals living in areas where extreme weather conditions — caused by climate change — have drastically impacted the water supply and environment, endangering their livelihoods and ability to survive.

This climate change story starts with an engrossing video that provides an up-close and personal look at the devastation that climate change-induced droughts have wreaked on people and the environment. As you scroll down, images of massively depleted bodies of water with superimposed text and quotes unfold before your eyes. It’s an efficient way to drive home the critical message WaterAid wants to convey: climate change is real, and it’s harming real people.

Each extreme weather story focuses on an individual to help viewers empathise and understand that climate change has real, drastic consequences for millions of people worldwide. The piece ends with a call to action to learn more about and financially support WaterAid’s fight to assist people living in the desperate situations depicted in the essay.

28 Days in Afghanistan

In this piece, Australian photo-journalist Andrew Quilty tells the story of the four weeks he spent in Afghanistan . He captures daily events ranging from the mundane—like a casual visit to his barber—to jarring. More than one photo documents blood-spattered victims of violence.

Viewers must scroll through the piece to follow Andrew’s daily musings and the striking photos that accompany them. His photo essay is a powerful example of how scrollytelling is transforming the art of long-form journalism .

La carrera lunática de Musk y Bezos (Musk and Bezos' lunatic careers)

Billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are angling to conquer the final frontier: space.

El Periódico captures their story via a whimsically illustrated photo essay, filled with neon line drawings and bold photos of the massive spaceships, the hangars that house them, and footprints on the moon. La carrera lunática de Musk y Bezos describes the battle between the two titans’ space companies (Blue Origin and SpaceX) for the honor of partially funding NASA’s next mission to the moon.

As you scroll down, white and fluorescent yellow words on a black background roll smoothly over images. The team at El Periódico slips in stylistic animations to break up the text—such as rocket ships with shimmering “vapour trails”—then ups the ante with a series of moon images that transition into portraits of the 12 U.S. astronauts who visited the celestial body.

The photo essay ends with the question: “Who will be the next to leave their footprints on the dusty lunar soil?” At the time of publishing, NASA had not yet decided between the two companies. (Spoiler alert: SpaceX won .)

Marissa Sapega is a seasoned writer, editor, and digital marketer with a background in web and graphic design.

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17 Awesome Photo Essay Examples You Should Try Yourself

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If you’re looking for a photo essay example (or 17!), you’ve come to the right place. But what is the purpose of a photo essay? A photo essay is intended to tell a story or evoke emotion from the viewers through a series of photographs. They allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. But how do you make one yourself? Here’s a list of photo essay examples. Choose one that you can easily do based on your photographic level and equipment.

Top 17 Photo Essay Examples

Here are some fantastic ideas to get you inspired to create your own photo essays!

17. Photograph a Protest

16. Transformation Photo Essays

15. Photograph the Same Place

14. Create a Photowalk

13. Follow the Change

12. Photograph a Local Event

11. Photograph an Abandoned Building

10. Behind the Scenes of a Photo Shoot

9. Capture Street Fashion

8. Landmark Photo Essay

7. Fathers & Children

6. A Day In the Life

5. Education Photo Essay

4. Fictitious Meals

3. Photograph Coffee Shops Using Cafenol

2. Photograph the Photographers

1. Capture the Neighbors

Photo essays tell stories. And there are plenty of amazingly interesting stories to tell! Photographing photo essays is a great way to practice your photography skills while having fun. You might even learn something! These photo essay examples are here to provide you with the inspiration to go out and tell your own stories through photos!

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Advice for an Unforgettable Photo Essay

Six steps for turning your images into a memorable photo essay, from curating your best work to crafting a title.

A man sits alone on a chair on the side of the road. We see him from above, surrounded by grey cobblestones neatly placed, a broken plastic chair, and some pylons scattered along the curb. A street cat wanders out of the frame and away from the man. He appears lonely, the only person inhabiting the place in which he seems so comfortably seated. As the eye wanders throughout the frame, however, the viewer discovers more: a vast city cast beyond the street and behind the man’s chair. This image closes Sarah Pannell’s photo essay Sehir , a quiet study of urban life.

Possibilities, discovery, and stories: these are some of the most effective elements of a photo essay. Collections of images can help produce a narrative, evoke emotion, and guide the viewer through one or more perspectives. A well-executed photo essay doesn’t rely on a title or any prior knowledge of its creator; it narrates on its own, moving viewers through sensations, lessons, and reactions.

Famous photo essays like Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith or Gordon Parks’ The Harlem Family are acclaimed for showing a glimpse into the lives of the sick and impoverished. Other well-made photo essays offer a new way to look at the everyday, such as Peter Funch’s much-reposted photo series 42nd and Vanderbilt , for which Funch photographed the same street corner for nine years. As shown by these photographers’ experiences with the medium, a collection of photos can enliven spaces and attitudes. Strong photo essays can give voice to marginalized individuals and shine a spotlight on previously overlooked experiences.

You don’t necessarily need to be a documentary photographer to create a powerful photo essay. Photo essays can showcase any topic, from nature photography to portraiture to wedding shots. We spoke to a few photographers to get their perspectives on what makes a good photo essay, and their tips for how any photographer can get started in this medium. Here are six steps to follow to create a photo essay that tells a memorable story.

Choose a specific topic or theme for your photo essay.

There are two types of photo essays: the narrative and the thematic. Narrative photo essays focus on a story you’re telling the viewer, while thematic photo essays speak to a specific subject.

The most natural method for choosing a topic or theme for your photo essay is to go with what you know. Photograph what you experience. Whether that includes people, objects, or the things you think about throughout the day, accessibility is key here. Common topics or concepts to start with are emotions (depicting sadness or happiness) or experiences (everyday life, city living).

For photographer Sharon Pannen , planning a photo essay is as simple as “picking out a subject you find interesting or you want to make a statement about.”

From Paper & Stories , a photo series by Sharon Pannen for Schön! Magazine.

Consider your photo subjects.

The subjects of your photographs, whether human or not, will fill the space of your photos and influence the mood or idea you’re trying to depict. The subject can determine whether or not your photos are considered interesting. “I always try to find someone that catches my eye. I especially like to see how the light falls on their face and how a certain aesthetic might add to their persona,” says photographer Victoria Wojtan .

While subjects and their interest factor are, well, subjective, when considering your subjects, you should ask yourself about your audience. Do other people want to see this? Is my subject representative of the larger idea my photo essay is trying to convey? Your projects can involve people you know or people you’ve only just met.

“Most projects I work on involve shooting portraits of strangers, so there’s always a tension in approaching someone for a portrait,” says photographer Taylor Dorrell . For Wojtan, that tension can help build trust with a subject and actually leads to more natural images “If there’s tension it’s usually because the person’s new to being photographed by someone for something that’s outside of a candid moment or selfie, and they need guidance for posing. This gives me the opportunity to make them feel more comfortable and let them be themselves. I tend to have a certain idea in mind, but try to allow for organic moments to happen.”

Aim for a variety of images.

Depending on your theme, there are a few types of photos you’ll want to use to anchor your essay. One or two lead photos should slowly introduce the viewer to your topic. These initial photos will function in a similar way to the introductory paragraph in a written essay or news article.

From there, you should consider further developing your narrative by introducing elements like portraiture, close ups, detail shots, and a carefully selected final photo to leave the viewer with the feeling you set out to produce in your photos. Consider your opening and closing images to be the most important elements of your photo essay, and choose them accordingly. You want your first images to hook the viewer, and you also want your final images to leave a lasting impression and perhaps offer a conclusion to the narrative you’ve developed.

Including different types of photos, shot at different ranges, angles, and perspectives, can help engage your viewer and add more texture to your series.

Says photographer Taylor Dorrell: “After I have a group of images, I tend to think about color, composition, the order the images were taken, the subject material, and relevance to the concept.”

From Taylor Dorrell’s photo essay White Fences : “White Fences is an ongoing photo series that explores the theme of suburban youth in the United States, specifically in the midwest suburb New Albany, Ohio.”

Put your emotions aside.

Self-doubt can easily come into play when working with your own photography. The adage that we are our own worst critics is often true. It can be difficult to objectively select your strongest images when creating a photo essay. This is why putting together photo essays is such a useful practice for developing your curatorial skills.

“The most important part for me is getting outside opinions. I don’t do that enough, and have a bias in selecting images that might not be the most powerful images or the most effective sequence of images,” says Dorrell. Your own perception of a photograph can cloud your ability to judge whether or not it adds to your photo essay. This is especially true when your essay deals with personal subjects. For example, a photo essay about your family may be hard to evaluate, as your own feelings about family members will impact how you take and view the photos. This is where getting feedback from peers can be invaluable to producing a strong series.

Collecting feedback while putting your photo essay together can help you determine the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps within the collection of photos you’ve produced. Ask your friends to tell you their favorites, why they like them, and what they think you’re going for in the work you’ve created. Their opinions can be your guide, not just your own emotions.

Edit your photo selection.

Beyond post-production, the series of photos you select as your essay will determine whether you’ve executed your theme or narrative effectively. Can the photos stand alone, without written words, and tell the story you set out to? Do they make sense together, in a logical sequence? The perfect photo essay will give your audience a full picture of the narrative, theme, or essence you’re looking to capture.

A good method to use to cull your images down is to remove as many as half of your images straight away to see if your narrative is still as strong with fewer photos. Or, perhaps, deciding on a small number you’d like to aim for (maybe just five to ten images) and using this as a method to narrow down to the images that tell your story best.

From Taylor Dorrell’s photo essay Over the Rhine , featured in Vice.

Give your photo essay a title, and add a concise written statement.

Finally, you’ll want to create a title and written statement for your photo essay. This will help position your work and can enable the viewer to fully understand your intention, or at least guide their perspective.

A solid written statement and title will be relevant to your topic, detail your primary objective, and introduce your point of view. It’s an opportunity to clarify your intentions to the viewer and ensure they walk away with a clear interpretation of your work. Depending on your photo essay, you may want to include several paragraphs of text, but even just one or two sentences of background can be enough to expand the viewer’s understanding of your work.

Consider if you’d like to add the written statement at the beginning of your essay to introduce it, or at the end as a conclusion. Either one can be impactful, and it depends how you’d like people to experience your work.

For his photo essay White Fences, excerpted above, Taylor Dorrell wrote only one sentence of introduction. But for his series Over the Rhine, Dorell included a longer written statement to accompany the work, which is “an ongoing photo series that seeks to explore the Cincinnati neighborhood of the same name and its surroundings. The series was started in response to the shooting of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man, by officer Ray Tensing of the University of Cincinnati Police, which happened July 19th, 2015.” Dorell’s text goes on to offer more background on the project, setting up the viewer with all the information they need to understand the context of the photo essay.

Depending on the motivations behind your photo essay and what sort of subject it depicts, a longer text may be necessary—or just a few words might be enough.

Looking for a place to share your photo essays with the world? Take a look at our guide to creating a photography website for tips on showcasing your photos online.

Cover image by Taylor Dorrell, from his photo essay Hurricane Over Sugar .

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Photo essays: telling stories with a series of images, the art of storytelling through photo essays.

A photo essay is a powerful tool for storytelling, using a series of images to convey a narrative, explore a theme, or express an idea. Unlike a single photograph, a photo essay allows for a more comprehensive exploration of a subject, combining the power of visual imagery with the depth of storytelling. This article explores the art of creating photo essays, offering insights into how photographers can use this medium to tell compelling stories.

Understanding Photo Essays A photo essay is a collection of images that are arranged to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. It can be as simple as a series of photographs documenting a day in the life of someone or as complex as a long-term project exploring a significant social issue.

Key Elements of a Photo Essay

• Theme or Narrative: Every photo essay should have a clear theme or narrative. This could be a specific event, a personal story, a social issue, or any subject that can be explored in depth.
• Variety of Images: Include a variety of shots such as wide, medium, and close-ups. Different angles and compositions keep the essay dynamic and engaging.
• Emotional Impact: The best photo essays evoke emotional responses, whether it’s joy, sadness, surprise, or anger.
• Consistency: Maintaining a consistent style and tone throughout the essay helps in reinforcing the narrative.

Creating a Photo Essay: Steps and Tips

• Choose a Compelling Subject: Start with a subject that you are passionate about or find interesting.
• Plan Your Shots: Think about the story you want to tell and plan your shots accordingly. What images do you need to capture to tell this story?
• Look for Narrative Elements: Include elements that help to develop the story, like characters, setting, conflict, and resolution.
• Edit and Arrange: Edit your photos for style and quality. Arrange them in a way that makes the narrative flow naturally.
• Include Captions or Text: Sometimes, captions or brief text can help provide context or enhance the story.

Challenges in Creating Photo Essays

• Telling a Cohesive Story: Ensuring that your images collectively tell a clear and cohesive story can be challenging.
• Engagement and Impact: Capturing and maintaining the viewer’s interest throughout the essay.

Ethical Considerations

• Respect for Subjects: Always approach your subjects with respect, especially when dealing with sensitive topics.
• Authenticity: Maintain the authenticity of your images. Avoid misrepresenting or exploiting your subject matter.

Photo essays are a potent medium for photographers to tell stories in a visually compelling and narratively rich way. They challenge photographers to think critically about storytelling and the use of images to convey emotions and narratives. When done effectively, photo essays can be powerful tools for communication, education, and advocacy.

In this article, we’ve explored the concept of photo essays as a storytelling medium in photography. By carefully selecting and sequencing images, photographers can craft engaging and thought-provoking narratives that resonate with audiences and provide deeper insights into their subjects.

#PhotoEssays #StorytellingWithPhotos #VisualNarratives #DocumentaryPhotography #PhotographyArt #NarrativePhotography #PhotographySeries #Accurova #AccurovaAI #PhotographyStorytelling #Photojournalism #VisualStorytelling #PhotographyProject

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Meet Julian Cheung, a passionate professional photographer dedicated to immortalising your life's invaluable moments.

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11 Of The Most Interesting Photo Essays

The photo editors of BuzzFeed take a look at all of the best photo collections from this week.

1. "23 Super-Creepy Pictures of Forgotten Olympic Villages" —BuzzFeed

“Olympics time is here! Hosting cities pour tons of money into building massive structures in order to host the games . But what happens to them once all the hubbub dies down? This essay is such an interesting look at these spaces when left to the wild.” —Dennis Huynh, design director, BuzzFeed News

2. "These Women Are Using Photography to Cope With the Aftermath of an ISIS Massacre" —BuzzFeed

"Oh, how truly powerful photographs can be, and this photo series proves just that. UNICEF gave cameras and tutorials to 25 young Yazidi women so they can photograph their community as they learned to cope with the aftermath of an ISIS massacre. With this medium, they weren’t just given the voice to tell the world their story, but also empowered them to have personal goals and aspirations. After all, they were allowed to keep their cameras." —Anna Mendoza, photo editor, BuzzFeed Australia

3. "At the Front in a Scarred Fallujah" — New York Times

"It is important to see what war looks like in some ways. For all the rhetoric about the war on terrorism that is thrown about in the US, there is relatively little visual coverage about the frontlines in the Middle East. Denton's photographs show that the war in Iraq, which has waxed and waned in popularity and our consciousness for the past 13 years, is still ongoing, still brutal, and still very relevant to our stated goals even as the enemy has changed." —Kate Bubacz, senior photo editor for BuzzFeed News

4. "Learning Life Lessons by Faking One's Own Funeral" — The Atlantic

"There’s probably nothing more natural to living than contemplating your own death. In South Korea, a trend has emerged called 'Happy Dying' in which participants are invited to write their own eulogies and wills, crawl into their very own coffin and essentially, well, die. After 30 minutes of 'death', they crawl out of the coffin and apparently feel much better about their lives. Neat." —Gabriel H. Sanchez, photo essay editor, BuzzFeed

5. "These Beautiful Photos of Subway Stations Will Transport You From Your Daily Commute" — Atlas Obscura

“I love subways/metros like Oprah loves bread! Chris Forsyth images of metro stations in Canada and around Europe show how cool and mod the architecture of those massive spaces can be make make me want to book some tickets.” —DH

6. "A Death in Manila" —Reuters

"Of the 300 suspected drug dealers found dead since Rodrigo Duterte assumed presidency in the Philippines, this photo of Jennelyn Olaires cradling the body of her husband stood out among the rest. The new president, notoriously known as 'the punisher', called this 'melodramatic', with the media hyping it up as if it was Michelangelo’s Pieta. 'War on Drugs' was his campaign battle cry and this photo perfectly summed up what he has done, directly or indirectly, in his first 30 days." —AM

7. "The Trans Community of Christopher Street" — The New Yorker

"These portraits have a dignity and an intimacy about them , each face strikingly beautiful in its individuality. I was so moved reading stories and seeing the variety of faces that all turn to Christopher Street for a sense of community." —KB

8. "International Garden Photographer of the Year Macro Art Winners" — The Telegraph

"These extreme close-up shots of plant life highlight just how alien planet earth can look. Out of context, these seed pods and surfaces of leaves appear like the aerial terrain of a remote exotic planet. The competition is in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK, and will be touring in exhibitions all over the world. The overall winner was ‘Embryo’ (above) by George Pantazis with a photo taken in his garden in Limassol, Cyprus." —Matthew Tucker, picture editor, BuzzFeed UK

9. "People Really Open Up in the Summer’: the North Korean Seasons" — The Guardian

"Could it be true? Is this possibly the most secluded beach vacation getaway in the world? No one thinks of North Korea as a summer holiday destination. But with a brand-new airport recently completed near the resort town of Wonsan (apparently, it’s popular with locals), it may just be the next hot ticket among foreign travellers." —AM

10. "Photographing the Mirage of the American Dream in Las Vegas" — Time Lightbox

"The party’s been raging strong in Las Vegas for decades — but if you look closely, as Swiss photographer Christian Lutz does in his new photo book Insert Coins , you’ll see the cracks and faults of a city with a reputation for sin. Here, Time shares a comically distressing look at Las Vegas when the party is over." —GHS

11. "Aging Inmates: Photographer Shines Light on Loneliness and Isolation" — National Geographic Proof

" Jessica Earnshaw's work on aging in prison is breathtaking in its scope and its ceaseless attention to the humanity of the inmates. This is a very different look at prisons that is worth giving attention to." —KB

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How to Make a Photo Essay: 5 Tips for Impactful Results

A Post By: Christina N Dickson

Want to tell meaningful stories with your photos? That’s what a photo essay is all about: conveying concepts and narratives through a series of carefully chosen images.

While telling a story with photos can be a daunting task, there are several easy tips and techniques you can use in your photo essays to create striking, stunning, eye-opening results.

And that’s what I’m going to share in this article: five photo essay tips that you can immediately apply to your photography. You’ll leave as a better photo essayist than when you arrived!

Let’s get started.

What is a photo essay?

A photo essay is a collection of images placed in a specific order to convey certain emotions , specific concepts, or a progression of events.

In other words:

The photo essay tells stories just like a normal piece of writing , except with images instead of words. (Here, I’m using the term “story” loosely; as mentioned above, photo essays can encapsulate emotions or concepts in addition to traditional, time-based narratives.)

Plenty of world-class photojournalists use photo essays, including Lauren Greenfield, James Nachtwey, and Joachim Ladefoged. But the photo essay format isn’t exclusive to professionals, and photo essays don’t need to cover dramatic events such as wars, natural disasters, and social issues. Whether you are a complete beginner, a hobbyist, or a professional, the photo essay is a great way to bring your images to life, tell relevant stories about your own surroundings, and touch your family, friends, and coworkers.

So without further ado, let’s look at five easy tips to take your photo essays to the next level, starting with:

1. Find a topic you care about

Every good photo essay should start with an idea .

Otherwise, you’ll be shooting without a purpose – and while such an approach may eventually lead to an interesting series of photos, it’s far, far easier to begin with a topic and only then take out your camera.

As I emphasized above, a photo essay can be about anything. You don’t need to fixate on “classic” photo essay themes, such as war and poverty. Instead, you might focus on local issues that matter to you (think of problems plaguing your community). You can also think about interesting stories worth telling, even if they don’t have an activism angle.

For instance, is there an area undergoing major development? Try documenting the work from start to finish. Is there a particular park or nature area you love? Create a series of images that communicate its beauty.

One key item to remember:

Photo essays are most powerful when you, as the photographer, care about the subject. Whether you choose to document something major and public, like an environmental crisis, or whether you choose to document something small and intimate, like the first month of a newborn in the family, make sure you focus on a topic that matters to you .

Otherwise, you’ll struggle to finish the essay – and even if you do successfully complete it, viewers will likely notice your lack of passion.

2. Do your research

The best photo essays involve some real work. Don’t just walk around and shoot with abandon; instead, try to understand your subject.

That way, you can capture a more authentic series of photos.

For instance, if you document a newborn’s first month , spend time with the family. Discover who the parents are, what culture they are from, and their parenting philosophy.

If you cover the process of a school’s drama production, talk with the teachers, actors, and stagehands; investigate the general interest of the student body; find out how the school is financing the production and keeping costs down.

If you photograph a birthday party, check out the theme, the decorations they plan on using, what the birthday kid hopes to get for their gifts.

If you’re passionate about your topic, the research should come easy. You should enjoy learning the backstory.

And then, when it comes time to actually shoot, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of the topic. You’ll know the key players in the story, the key ideas, and the key locations. You’ll be able to hone in on what matters and block out the flashy distractions.

Make sense?

3. Find the right angle

Once you’ve done your research, you’ll know your topic inside and out.

At which point you’ll need to ask yourself:

What is the real, authentic story I want to tell?

Every story has a hundred different angles and perspectives. And trying to share the story from every perspective is a recipe for failure.

Instead, pick a single angle and focus on it. If you’re documenting a local issue, do you want to focus on how it affects children? The physical area? The economy? If you’re documenting a newborn’s first month, do you want to focus on the interaction between the newborn and the parents? The growth of the newborn? The newborn’s emotions?

As you’ll find out during your research, even stories that seem to be completely one-sided have plenty of hidden perspectives to draw on.

So think about your story carefully. In general, I recommend you approach it from the angle you’re most passionate about (consider the previous tip!), but you’re always free to explore different perspectives.

4. Convey emotion

Not all photo essays must convey emotion. But the most powerful ones do.

After all, think of the stories that you know and love. Your favorite books, movies, and TV shows. Do they touch you on an emotional level?

Don’t get me wrong: Every photo essay shouldn’t cover a sappy, heartstring-tugging tale. You can always focus on conveying other emotions: anger, joy, fear, hurt, excitement.

(Of course, if your story is sappy and heartstring-tugging, that’s fine, too – just don’t force it!)

How do you convey emotions, though? There’s no one set way, but you can include photos of meaningful scenes – human interactions generally work well here! – or you can simply show emotion on the faces of your photographic subjects . Really, the best way to communicate emotions through your photos is to feel the emotions yourself; they’ll bleed over into your work for a unique result.

5. Plan your shots

Once you’ve done the research and determined the angle and emotions you’d like to convey, I recommend you sit down, take out a pen and paper, and plan your photo essay .

Should you extensively visualize each photo? Should you walk through the venue, imagining possible compositions ?

Honestly, that’s up to you, and it’ll depend on how you like to work. I do recommend that beginners start out by creating a “shot list” for the essay. Here, you should describe the main subject, the narrative purpose of the image, plus any lighting or composition notes. Once you become more experienced, you can be looser in your planning, though I still recommend you at least think about the different shots you want to capture.

You can start by planning 10 shots. Each one should emphasize a different concept or emotion, but make sure to keep a consistent thread running through every composition; after all, the end goal is to create a powerful series of images that tell a story.

One final tip:

While you should stick to your plan pretty closely, at least at first, don’t ignore the potential for spontaneity. If you see a possible shot, take it! You can later evaluate whether it’s a worthwhile addition to your essay.

Photo essay tips: final words

Now that you’ve finished this article, you know all about what photo essays are, and – hopefully! – how to create a beautiful essay of your own.

Just remember: storytelling takes practice, but you don’t have to be an incredible writer to pull off a powerful photo essay. All you need is a bit of photographic technique, some creativity, and a lot of heart.

Once you start to tell stories with your photos, your portfolio will never be the same!

Now over to you:

Do you have any tips for doing photo essays? Do you have any essays you’re proud of? Share them in the comments below!

Read more from our Tips & Tutorials category

is a visionary artist and philanthropist in Portland Oregon. Her work includes wedding photography www.BrideInspired.com and leadership with www.RevMediaBlog.com .

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What is a Photo Essay? 9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

A photo essay is a series of photographs that tell a story. Unlike a written essay, a photo essay focuses on visuals instead of words. With a photo essay, you can stretch your creative limits and explore new ways to connect with your audience. Whatever your photography skill level, you can recreate your own fun and creative photo essay.

9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

• Photowalk Photo Essay
• Transformation Photo Essay
• Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Building Photo Essay
• Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay
• Behind the Scenes Photo Essay
• Family Photo Essay
• Education Photo Essay

Stories are important to all of us. While some people gravitate to written stories, others are much more attuned to visual imagery. With a photo essay, you can tell a story without writing a word. Your use of composition, contrast, color, and perspective in photography will convey ideas and evoke emotions.

To explore narrative photography, you can use basic photographic equipment. You can buy a camera or even use your smartphone to get started. While lighting, lenses, and post-processing software can enhance your photos, they aren’t necessary to achieve good results.

Whether you need to complete a photo essay assignment or want to pursue one for fun or professional purposes, you can use these photo essay ideas for your photography inspiration . Once you know the answer to “what is a photo essay?” and find out how fun it is to create one, you’ll likely be motivated to continue your forays into photographic storytelling.

1 . Photowalk Photo Essay

One popular photo essay example is a photowalk. Simply put, a photowalk is time you set aside to walk around a city, town, or a natural site and take photos. Some cities even have photowalk tours led by professional photographers. On these tours, you can learn the basics about how to operate your camera, practice photography composition techniques, and understand how to look for unique shots that help tell your story.

Set aside at least two to three hours for your photowalk. Even if you’re photographing a familiar place—like your own home town—try to look at it through new eyes. Imagine yourself as a first-time visitor or pretend you’re trying to educate a tourist about the area.

Walk around slowly and look for different ways to capture the mood and energy of your location. If you’re in a city, capture wide shots of streets, close-ups of interesting features on buildings, street signs, and candid shots of people. Look for small details that give the city character and life. And try some new concepts—like reflection picture ideas—by looking for opportunities to photographs reflections in mirrored buildings, puddles, fountains, or bodies of water.

2 . Transformation Photo Essay

With a transformation photography essay, you can tell the story about change over time. One of the most popular photostory examples, a transformation essay can document a mom-to-be’s pregnancy or a child’s growth from infancy into the toddler years. But people don’t need to be the focus of a transformation essay. You can take photos of a house that is being built or an urban area undergoing revitalization.

You can also create a photo narrative to document a short-term change. Maybe you want to capture images of your growing garden or your move from one home to another. These examples of photo essays are powerful ways of telling the story of life’s changes—both large and small.

3 . Day in the Life Photo Essay

Want a unique way to tell a person’s story? Or, perhaps you want to introduce people to a career or activity. You may want to consider a day in the life essay.

With this photostory example, your narrative focuses on a specific subject for an entire day. For example, if you are photographing a farmer, you’ll want to arrive early in the morning and shadow the farmer as he or she performs daily tasks. Capture a mix of candid shots of the farmer at work and add landscapes and still life of equipment for added context. And if you are at a farm, don’t forget to get a few shots of the animals for added character, charm, or even a dose of humor. These types of photography essay examples are great practice if you are considering pursuing photojournalism. They also help you learn and improve your candid portrait skills.

4 . Event Photo Essay

Events are happening in your local area all the time, and they can make great photo essays. With a little research, you can quickly find many events that you could photograph. There may be bake sales, fundraisers, concerts, art shows, farm markets, block parties, and other non profit event ideas . You could also focus on a personal event, such as a birthday or graduation.

At most events, your primary emphasis will be on capturing candid photos of people in action. You can also capture backgrounds or objects to set the scene. For example, at a birthday party, you’ll want to take photos of the cake and presents.

For a local or community event, you can share your photos with the event organizer. Or, you may be able to post them on social media and tag the event sponsor. This is a great way to gain recognition and build your reputation as a talented photographer.

5. Building Photo Essay

Many buildings can be a compelling subject for a photographic essay. Always make sure that you have permission to enter and photograph the building. Once you do, look for interesting shots and angles that convey the personality, purpose, and history of the building. You may also be able to photograph the comings and goings of people that visit or work in the building during the day.

Some photographers love to explore and photograph abandoned buildings. With these types of photos, you can provide a window into the past. Definitely make sure you gain permission before entering an abandoned building and take caution since some can have unsafe elements and structures.

6. Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay

Taking a series of photos of a historic site or landmark can be a great experience. You can learn to capture the same site from different angles to help portray its character and tell its story. And you can also photograph how people visit and engage with the site or landmark. Take photos at different times of day and in varied lighting to capture all its nuances and moods.

You can also use your photographic essay to help your audience understand the history of your chosen location. For example, if you want to provide perspective on the Civil War, a visit to a battleground can be meaningful. You can also visit a site when reenactors are present to share insight on how life used to be in days gone by.

7 . Behind the Scenes Photo Essay

Another fun essay idea is taking photos “behind the scenes” at an event. Maybe you can chronicle all the work that goes into a holiday festival from the early morning set-up to the late-night teardown. Think of the lead event planner as the main character of your story and build the story about him or her.

Or, you can go backstage at a drama production. Capture photos of actors and actresses as they transform their looks with costuming and makeup. Show the lead nervously pacing in the wings before taking center stage. Focus the work of stagehands, lighting designers, and makeup artists who never see the spotlight but bring a vital role in bringing the play to life.

8. Family Photo Essay

If you enjoy photographing people, why not explore photo story ideas about families and relationships? You can focus on interactions between two family members—such as a father and a daughter—or convey a message about a family as a whole.

Sometimes these type of photo essays can be all about the fun and joy of living in a close-knit family. But sometimes they can be powerful portraits of challenging social topics. Images of a family from another country can be a meaningful photo essay on immigration. You could also create a photo essay on depression by capturing families who are coping with one member’s illness.

For these projects on difficult topics, you may want to compose a photo essay with captions. These captions can feature quotes from family members or document your own observations. Although approaching hard topics isn’t easy, these types of photos can have lasting impact and value.

9. Education Photo Essay

Opportunities for education photo essays are everywhere—from small preschools to community colleges and universities. You can seek permission to take photos at public or private schools or even focus on alternative educational paths, like homeschooling.

Your education photo essay can take many forms. For example, you can design a photo essay of an experienced teacher at a high school. Take photos of him or her in action in the classroom, show quiet moments grading papers, and capture a shared laugh between colleagues in the teacher’s lounge.

Alternatively, you can focus on a specific subject—such as science and technology. Or aim to portray a specific grade level, document activities club or sport, or portray the social environment. A photo essay on food choices in the cafeteria can be thought-provoking or even funny. There are many potential directions to pursue and many great essay examples.

While education is an excellent topic for a photo essay for students, education can be a great source of inspiration for any photographer.

Why Should You Create a Photo Essay?

Ultimately, photographers are storytellers. Think of what a photographer does during a typical photo shoot. He or she will take a series of photos that helps convey the essence of the subject—whether that is a person, location, or inanimate object. For example, a family portrait session tells the story of a family—who they are, their personalities, and the closeness of their relationship.

Learning how to make a photo essay can help you become a better storyteller—and a better photographer. You’ll cultivate key photography skills that you can carry with you no matter where your photography journey leads.

If you simply want to document life’s moments on social media, you may find that a single picture doesn’t always tell the full story. Reviewing photo essay examples and experimenting with your own essay ideas can help you choose meaningful collections of photos to share with friends and family online.

Learning how to create photo essays can also help you work towards professional photography ambitions. You’ll often find that bloggers tell photographic stories. For example, think of cooking blogs that show you each step in making a recipe. Photo essays are also a mainstay of journalism. You’ll often find photo essays examples in many media outlets—everywhere from national magazines to local community newspapers. And the best travel photographers on Instagram tell great stories with their photos, too.

With a photo essay, you can explore many moods and emotions. Some of the best photo essays tell serious stories, but some are humorous, and others aim to evoke action.

You can raise awareness with a photo essay on racism or a photo essay on poverty. A photo essay on bullying can help change the social climate for students at a school. Or, you can document a fun day at the beach or an amusement park. You have control of the themes, photographic elements, and the story you want to tell.

5 Steps to Create a Photo Essay

Every photo essay will be different, but you can use a standard process. Following these five steps will guide you through every phase of your photo essay project—from brainstorming creative essay topics to creating a photo essay to share with others.

Step 1: Choose Your Photo Essay Topics

Just about any topic you can imagine can form the foundation for a photo essay. You may choose to focus on a specific event, such as a wedding, performance, or festival. Or you may want to cover a topic over a set span of time, such as documenting a child’s first year. You could also focus on a city or natural area across the seasons to tell a story of changing activities or landscapes.

Since the best photo essays convey meaning and emotion, choose a topic of interest. Your passion for the subject matter will shine through each photograph and touch your viewer’s hearts and minds.

Step 2: Conduct Upfront Research

Much of the work in a good-quality photo essay begins before you take your first photo. It’s always a good idea to do some research on your planned topic.

Imagine you’re going to take photos of a downtown area throughout the year. You should spend some time learning the history of the area. Talk with local residents and business owners and find out about planned events. With these insights, you’ll be able to plan ahead and be prepared to take photos that reflect the area’s unique personality and lifestyles.

For any topic you choose, gather information first. This may involve internet searches, library research, interviews, or spending time observing your subject.

Step 3: Storyboard Your Ideas

After you have done some research and have a good sense of the story you want to tell, you can create a storyboard. With a storyboard, you can write or sketch out the ideal pictures you want to capture to convey your message.

You can turn your storyboard into a “shot list” that you can bring with you on site. A shot list can be especially helpful when you are at a one-time event and want to capture specific shots for your photo essay. If you’ve never created a photo essay before, start with ten shot ideas. Think of each shot as a sentence in your story. And aim to make each shot evoke specific ideas or emotions.

Step 4: Capture Images

Your storyboard and shot list will be important guides to help you make the most of each shoot. Be sure to set aside enough time to capture all the shots you need—especially if you are photographing a one-time event. And allow yourself to explore your ideas using different photography composition, perspective, and color contrast techniques.

You may need to take a hundred images or more to get ten perfect ones for your photographic essay. Or, you may find that you want to add more photos to your story and expand your picture essay concept.

Also, remember to look for special unplanned, moments that help tell your story. Sometimes, spontaneous photos that aren’t on your shot list can be full of meaning. A mix of planning and flexibility almost always yields the best results.

Step 5: Edit and Organize Photos to Tell Your Story

After capturing your images, you can work on compiling your photo story. To create your photo essay, you will need to make decisions about which images portray your themes and messages. At times, this can mean setting aside beautiful images that aren’t a perfect fit. You can use your shot list and storyboard as a guide but be open to including photos that weren’t in your original plans.

You may want to use photo editing software—such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop— to enhance and change photographs. With these tools, you can adjust lighting and white balance, perform color corrections, crop, or perform other edits. If you have a signature photo editing style, you may want to use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets to give all your photos a consistent look and feel.

You order a photo book from one of the best photo printing websites to publish your photo story. You can add them to an album on a photo sharing site, such as Flickr or Google Photos. Also, you could focus on building a website dedicated to documenting your concepts through visual photo essays. If so, you may want to use SEO for photographers to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results. You could even publish your photo essay on social media. Another thing to consider is whether you want to include text captures or simply tell your story through photographs.

Choose the medium that feels like the best space to share your photo essay ideas and vision with your audiences. You should think of your photo essay as your own personal form of art and expression when deciding where and how to publish it.

Photo Essays Can Help You Become a Better Photographer

Whatever your photography ambitions may be, learning to take a photo essay can help you grow. Even simple essay topics can help you gain skills and stretch your photographic limits. With a photo essay, you start to think about how a series of photographs work together to tell a complete story. You’ll consider how different shots work together, explore options for perspective and composition, and change the way you look at the world.

Before you start taking photos, you should review photo essay examples. You can find interesting pictures to analyze and photo story examples online, in books, or in classic publications, like Life Magazine . Don’t forget to look at news websites for photojournalism examples to broaden your perspective. This review process will help you in brainstorming simple essay topics for your first photo story and give you ideas for the future as well.

Ideas and inspiration for photo essay topics are everywhere. You can visit a park or go out into your own backyard to pursue a photo essay on nature. Or, you can focus on the day in the life of someone you admire with a photo essay of a teacher, fireman, or community leader. Buildings, events, families, and landmarks are all great subjects for concept essay topics. If you are feeling stuck coming up with ideas for essays, just set aside a few hours to walk around your city or town and take photos. This type of photowalk can be a great source of material.

You’ll soon find that advanced planning is critical to your success. Brainstorming topics, conducting research, creating a storyboard, and outlining a shot list can help ensure you capture the photos you need to tell your story. After you’ve finished shooting, you’ll need to decide where to house your photo essay. You may need to come up with photo album title ideas, write captions, and choose the best medium and layout.

Without question, creating a photo essay can be a valuable experience for any photographer. That’s true whether you’re an amateur completing a high school assignment or a pro looking to hone new skills. You can start small with an essay on a subject you know well and then move into conquering difficult ideas. Maybe you’ll want to create a photo essay on mental illness or a photo essay on climate change. Or maybe there’s another cause that is close to your heart.

Whatever your passion, you can bring it to life with a photo essay.

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• Photo Stories

10 Powerful Documentary Photo Essays From The Masters

Have you ever wondered where inspiration comes from? This is the question that journalists like to ask people of different professions in different variations. Artists get inspiration from anything, starting to create, they initially describe that around them to create something great, you need to fantasize, make letters or figures in your imagination. Similarly, in writing an essay or article, the author appeals to the imagination.

Probably everyone, studying in primary school, faced the problem of writing work by speaking and scrolling letters, words, and sentences. Sometimes it is difficult to cope on your own but instead, turn to specialists by writing write my essay cheap. Simple words that will help you find inspiration for other things.

Documenting people and the stories beyond the ordinary is one of the fascinating and daunting task in terms of Photojournalism. The Lives of those affected, the way they come into terms into reality & the very source for the ultimate word – Survival. Documentary photography shows us exactly what our world looks like at any given moment in time.

Whether the pictures are bleak, playful, angering or astounding, they all serve a historically significant purpose. A complete photo story is something which makes one understand the main objective for what it needs to be done, to bring a change to the masses, to show them light.

Here we have listed out some massive powerful stories for one to understand the severity of any situation. Less said, it would be more than a tribute to the sincere effort from these photojournalists. For a change, this time we wanted to outline the great works of our masters to understand and to estimate their role in bringing these powerful stories to the world.

Please check the below stories, a fine example of above statement. These photographers are captured their souls not photos. You have any photography story with you? please share with us, we will feature your work in this blog. Thanks in advance.

Click on the image to view the Full Story.

#1 Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith

“Country Doctor” is undoubtedly one of the commanding works by Eugene Smith and was an instant classic when first published, making him establish as a master. Plus an unique and influential photojournalists of 2oth century.

#2 A Photo Essay on the Great Depression by Dorothea Lange

This is a sneak peek into some of the powerful pictures produced by Dorothea Lange on the eve of the great depression during the 1930’s. Every picture here symbolizes the pain and agony people went through and Dorothea has registered a version of her in the books of history.

#3 Bhopal Gas Tragedy by Raghu Rai

One of the saddest industrial disaster which occured in Bhopal, India 1984. Numerous innocent lives were lost and more than that even after years of the tragedy many were indirectly affected through mutation and deconstructed DNA even today. Raghu rai’s pictures on this tragedy is immensely powerful and shows the mass graveyard and deadly scenes post the catastrophe.

#4 Vietnam War by Philip Jones Griffiths

His goal was to capture photographs in a digestible way, which could then appear to be witnessed by the world. The effects of war and post calamity and to show what really was happening in Vietnam with more profound importance.

#5 Gypsies by Josef Koudelka

Lives of people who kept wandering in search of their survival and the hope. These pictures show us their daily routine, beautiful music and some starvation for food.

#6 Nurse Midwife by W.Eugene Smith

Again a scintillating story on a Nurse midwife by Eugene Smith. Story of a lady who served as everything for thousands of poor people across 400 sq miles in the wild south.

#7 The Korean War by Werner Bischof

How brutal could war be and how cruelly brutal could the children affected by it, Werner Bischof produces more evidence and documentation in war front on this topic. Yet another powerful story on the lives lost.

#8 Struggle to Live – the fight against TB by James Nachtwey

James Nachtwey has documented the resurgence of tuberculosis and its varying strains MDR and XDR in seven countries around the world. One of the dreadful diseases to have consumed numerous lives of humanity.

#9 Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family Revisited

The Harlem Family is one of the haunting photo stories ever made by any photojournalist. Brutality of hunger and effect of poverty, the distance it drove a family towards disaster and eventually death.

#10 Stars Behind Bars – Life with the Prisonaires by Robert W. Kelley

A Photo narrative from the inside. the story unknown for most of the people was shown in pictures by Robert Kelley. These Pictures demonstrate prisoners way of living and provides more light on the stages they passed on.

Please check our previous documentary photography stories here:

• Most Influential Documentary Photography Stories
• Inspiring Documentary Photography Stories
• 15 Powerful Documentary Photography Stories
• 15 Heart Touching Documentary Photo Stories
• 10 Soulful Documentary Photography Stories
• 15 Unseen Powerful Documentary Photography Stories
• Documentary & Photojournalism
• Documentary Photo Essays
• Documentary Photography
• Documentary Photography Stories
• Heart Touching Photographs
• Photo Essay
• Photo Essays
• Photo Story
• Photojournalism
• Powerful Photographs
• Powerful Photos

the importance of documentary photography is immense for human history

Photo essays in black and white: http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger

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Pictures That Tell Stories: Photo Essay Examples

Like any other type of artist, a photographer’s job is to tell a story through their pictures. While some of the most creative among us can invoke emotion or convey a thought with one single photo, the rest of us will rely on a photo essay.

In the following article, we’ll go into detail about what a photo essay is and how to craft one while providing some detailed photo essay examples.

What is a Photo Essay? 

A photo essay is a series of photographs that, when assembled in a particular order, tell a unique and compelling story. While some photographers choose only to use pictures in their presentations, others will incorporate captions, comments, or even full paragraphs of text to provide more exposition for the scene they are unfolding.

A photo essay is a well-established part of photojournalism and have been used for decades to present a variety of information to the reader. Some of the most famous photo essayists include Ansel Adams , W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey. Of course, there are thousands of photo essay examples out there from which you can draw inspiration.

Why Consider Creating a Photo Essay?

As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth 1000 words.” This adage is, for many photographers, reason enough to hold a photo essay in particularly high regard.

For others, a photo essay allow them to take pictures that are already interesting and construct intricate, emotionally-charged tales out of them. For all photographers, it is yet another skill they can master to become better at their craft.

As you might expect, the photo essay have had a long history of being associated with photojournalism. From the Great Depression to Civil Rights Marches and beyond, many compelling stories have been told through a combination of images and text, or photos alone. A photo essay often evokes an intense reaction, whether artistic in nature or designed to prove a socio-political point.

Below, we’ll list some famous photo essay samples to further illustrate the subject.

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Famous Photo Essays

“The Great Depression” by Dorothea Lange – Shot and arranged in the 1930s, this famous photo essay still serves as a stark reminder of The Great Depression and Dust Bowl America . Beautifully photographed, the black and white images offer a bleak insight to one of the country’s most difficult times.

“The Vietnam War” by Philip Jones Griffiths – Many artists consider the Griffiths’ photo essay works to be some of the most important records of the war in Vietnam. His photographs and great photo essays are particularly well-remembered for going against public opinion and showing the suffering of the “other side,” a novel concept when it came to war photography.

Various American Natural Sites by Ansel Adams – Adams bought the beauty of nature home to millions, photographing the American Southwest and places like Yosemite National Park in a way that made the photos seem huge, imposing, and beautiful.

“Everyday” by Noah Kalina – Is a series of photographs arranged into a video. This photo essay features daily photographs of the artist himself, who began taking capturing the images when he was 19 and continued to do so for six years.

“Signed, X” by Kate Ryan – This is a powerful photo essay put together to show the long-term effects of sexual violence and assault. This photo essay is special in that it remains ongoing, with more subjects being added every year.

Common Types of Photo Essays

While a photo essay do not have to conform to any specific format or design, there are two “umbrella terms” under which almost all genres of photo essays tend to fall. A photo essay is thematic and narrative. In the following section, we’ll give some details about the differences between the two types, and then cover some common genres used by many artists.

⬥ Thematic 

A thematic photo essay speak on a specific subject. For instance, numerous photo essays were put together in the 1930s to capture the ruin of The Great Depression. Though some of these presentations followed specific people or families, they mostly told the “story” of the entire event. There is much more freedom with a thematic photo essay, and you can utilize numerous locations and subjects. Text is less common with these types of presentations.

⬥ Narrative 

A narrative photo essay is much more specific than thematic essays, and they tend to tell a much more direct story. For instance, rather than show a number of scenes from a Great Depression Era town, the photographer might show the daily life of a person living in Dust Bowl America. There are few rules about how broad or narrow the scope needs to be, so photographers have endless creative freedom. These types of works frequently utilize text.

Common Photo Essay Genres

Walk a City – This photo essay is when you schedule a time to walk around a city, neighborhood, or natural site with the sole goal of taking photos. Usually thematic in nature, this type of photo essay allows you to capture a specific place, it’s energy, and its moods and then pass them along to others.

The Relationship Photo Essay – The interaction between families and loved ones if often a fascinating topic for a photo essay. This photo essay genre, in particular, gives photographers an excellent opportunity to capture complex emotions like love and abstract concepts like friendship. When paired with introspective text, the results can be quite stunning. 

The Timelapse Transformation Photo Essay – The goal of a transformation photo essay is to capture the way a subject changes over time. Some people take years or even decades putting together a transformation photo essay, with subjects ranging from people to buildings to trees to particular areas of a city.

Going Behind The Scenes Photo Essay – Many people are fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes of big events. Providing the photographer can get access; to an education photo essay can tell a very unique and compelling story to their viewers with this photo essay.

Photo Essay of a Special Event – There are always events and occasions going on that would make an interesting subject for a photo essay. Ideas for this photo essay include concerts, block parties, graduations, marches, and protests. Images from some of the latter were integral to the popularity of great photo essays.

The Daily Life Photo Essay – This type of photo essay often focus on a single subject and attempt to show “a day in the life” of that person or object through the photographs. This type of photo essay can be quite powerful depending on the subject matter and invoke many feelings in the people who view them.

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Photo Essay Ideas and Examples

One of the best ways to gain a better understanding of photo essays is to view some photo essay samples. If you take the time to study these executions in detail, you’ll see just how photo essays can make you a better photographer and offer you a better “voice” with which to speak to your audience.

Some of these photo essay ideas we’ve already touched on briefly, while others will be completely new to you. 

Cover a Protest or March  

Some of the best photo essay examples come from marches, protests, and other events associated with movements or socio-political statements. Such events allow you to take pictures of angry, happy, or otherwise empowered individuals in high-energy settings. The photo essay narrative can also be further enhanced by arriving early or staying long after the protest has ended to catch contrasting images. 

Photograph a Local Event  

Whether you know it or not, countless unique and interesting events are happening in and around your town this year. Such events provide photographers new opportunities to put together a compelling photo essay. From ethnic festivals to historical events to food and beverage celebrations, there are many different ways to capture and celebrate local life.

Visit an Abandoned Site or Building  

Old homes and historical sites are rich with detail and can sometimes appear dilapidated, overgrown by weeds, or broken down by time. These qualities make them a dynamic and exciting subject. Many great photo essay works of abandoned homes use a mix of far-away shots, close-ups, weird angles, and unique lighting. Such techniques help set a mood that the audience can feel through the photographic essay.

Chronicle a Pregnancy

Few photo essay topics could be more personal than telling the story of a pregnancy. Though this photo essay example can require some preparation and will take a lot of time, the results of a photographic essay like this are usually extremely emotionally-charged and touching. In some cases, photographers will continue the photo essay project as the child grows as well.

Photograph Unique Lifestyles  

People all over the world are embracing society’s changes in different ways. People live in vans or in “tiny houses,” living in the woods miles away from everyone else, and others are growing food on self-sustaining farms. Some of the best photo essay works have been born out of these new, inspiring movements.

Photograph Animals or Pets  

If you have a favorite animal (or one that you know very little about), you might want to arrange a way to see it up close and tell its story through images. You can take photos like this in a zoo or the animal’s natural habitat, depending on the type of animal you choose. Pets are another great topic for a photo essay and are among the most popular subjects for many photographers.

Show Body Positive Themes  

So much of modern photography is about showing the best looking, prettiest, or sexiest people at all times. Choosing a photo essay theme like body positivity, however, allows you to film a wide range of interesting-looking people from all walks of life.

Such a photo essay theme doesn’t just apply to women, as beauty can be found everywhere. As a photo essay photographer, it’s your job to find it!

Bring Social Issues to Life  

Some of the most impactful social photo essay examples are those where the photographer focuses on social issues. From discrimination to domestic violence to the injustices of the prison system, there are many ways that a creative photographer can highlight what’s wrong with the world. This type of photo essay can be incredibly powerful when paired with compelling subjects and some basic text.

Photograph Style and Fashion

If you live in or know of a particularly stylish locale or area, you can put together an excellent thematic photo essay by capturing impromptu shots of well-dressed people as they pass by. As with culture, style is easily identifiable and is as unifying as it is divisive. Great photo essay examples include people who’ve covered fashion sub-genres from all over the world, like urban hip hop or Japanese Visual Kei. 

Photograph Native Cultures and Traditions  

If you’ve ever opened up a copy of National Geographic, you’ve probably seen photo essay photos that fit this category. To many, the traditions, dress, religious ceremonies, and celebrations of native peoples and foreign cultures can be utterly captivating. For travel photographers, this photo essay is considered one of the best ways to tell a story with or without text.

Capture Seasonal Or Time Changes In A Landmark Photo Essay

Time-lapse photography is very compelling to most viewers. What they do in a few hours, however, others are doing over months, years, and even decades. If you know of an exciting landscape or scene, you can try to capture the same image in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, and put that all together into one landmark photo essay.

Alternatively, you can photograph something being lost or ravaged by time or weather. The subject of your landmark photo essay can be as simple as the wall of an old building or as complex as an old house in the woods being taken over by nature. As always, there are countless transformation-based landmark photo essay works from which you can draw inspiration.

Photograph Humanitarian Efforts or Charity  

Humanitarian efforts by groups like Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders can invoke a powerful response through even the simplest of photos. While it can be hard to put yourself in a position to get the images, there are countless photo essay examples to serve as inspiration for your photo essay project.

How to Create a Photo Essay

There is no singular way to create a photo essay. As it is, ultimately, and artistic expression of the photographer, there is no right, wrong, good, or bad. However, like all stories, some tell them well and those who do not. Luckily, as with all things, practice does make perfect. Below, we’ve listed some basic steps outlining how to create a photo essay

Steps To Create A Photo Essay

Choose Your Topic – While some photo essayists will be able to “happen upon” a photo story and turn it into something compelling, most will want to choose their photo essay topics ahead of time. While the genres listed above should provide a great starting place, it’s essential to understand that photo essay topics can cover any event or occasion and any span of time

Do Some Research – The next step to creating a photo essay is to do some basic research. Examples could include learning the history of the area you’re shooting or the background of the person you photograph. If you’re photographing a new event, consider learning the story behind it. Doing so will give you ideas on what to look for when you’re shooting.  

Make a Storyboard – Storyboards are incredibly useful tools when you’re still in the process of deciding what photo story you want to tell. By laying out your ideas shot by shot, or even doing rough illustrations of what you’re trying to capture, you can prepare your photo story before you head out to take your photos.

This process is especially important if you have little to no control over your chosen subject. People who are participating in a march or protest, for instance, aren’t going to wait for you to get in position before offering up the perfect shot. You need to know what you’re looking for and be prepared to get it.

Get the Right Images – If you have a shot list or storyboard, you’ll be well-prepared to take on your photo essay. Make sure you give yourself enough time (where applicable) and take plenty of photos, so you have a lot from which to choose. It would also be a good idea to explore the area, show up early, and stay late. You never know when an idea might strike you.

Assemble Your Story – Once you develop or organize your photos on your computer, you need to choose the pictures that tell the most compelling photo story or stories. You might also find some great images that don’t fit your photo story These can still find a place in your portfolio, however, or perhaps a completely different photo essay you create later.

Depending on the type of photographer you are, you might choose to crop or digitally edit some of your photos to enhance the emotions they invoke. Doing so is completely at your discretion, but worth considering if you feel you can improve upon the naked image.

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Best Photo Essays Tips And Tricks

Before you approach the art of photo essaying for the first time, you might want to consider with these photo essay examples some techniques, tips, and tricks that can make your session more fun and your final results more interesting. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best advice we could find on the subject of photo essays. 

⬥ Experiment All You Want 

You can, and should, plan your topic and your theme with as much attention to detail as possible. That said, some of the best photo essay examples come to us from photographers that got caught up in the moment and decided to experiment in different ways. Ideas for experimentation include the following: 

Angles – Citizen Kane is still revered today for the unique, dramatic angles used in the film. Though that was a motion picture and not photography, the same basic principles still apply. Don’t be afraid to photograph some different angles to see how they bring your subject to life in different ways.

Color – Some images have more gravitas in black in white or sepia tone. You can say the same for images that use color in an engaging, dynamic way. You always have room to experiment with color, both before and after the shoot.

Contrast – Dark and light, happy and sad, rich and poor – contrast is an instantly recognizable form of tension that you can easily include in your photo essay. In some cases, you can plan for dramatic contrasts. In other cases, you simply need to keep your eyes open.

Exposure Settings – You can play with light in terms of exposure as well, setting a number of different moods in the resulting photos. Some photographers even do random double exposures to create a photo essay that’s original.

Filters – There are endless post-production options available to photographers, particularly if they use digital cameras. Using different programs and apps, you can completely alter the look and feel of your image, changing it from warm to cool or altering dozens of different settings.

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If you’re using traditional film instead of a digital camera, you’re going to want to stock up. Getting the right shots for a photo essay usually involves taking hundreds of images that will end up in the rubbish bin. Taking extra pictures you won’t use is just the nature of the photography process. Luckily, there’s nothing better than coming home to realize that you managed to capture that one, perfect photograph. 

⬥ Set the Scene 

You’re not just telling a story to your audience – you’re writing it as well. If the scene you want to capture doesn’t have the look you want, don’t be afraid to move things around until it does. While this doesn’t often apply to photographing events that you have no control over, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a second to make an OK shot a great shot. 

⬥ Capture Now, Edit Later 

Editing, cropping, and digital effects can add a lot of drama and artistic flair to your photos. That said, you shouldn’t waste time on a shoot, thinking about how you can edit it later. Instead, make sure you’re capturing everything that you want and not missing out on any unique pictures. If you need to make changes later, you’ll have plenty of time! 

⬥ Make It Fun 

As photographers, we know that taking pictures is part art, part skill, and part performance. If you want to take the best photo essays, you need to loosen up and have fun. Again, you’ll want to plan for your topic as best as you can, but don’t be afraid to lose yourself in the experience. Once you let yourself relax, both the ideas and the opportunities will manifest.

⬥ It’s All in The Details 

When someone puts out a photographic essay for an audience, that work usually gets analyzed with great attention to detail. You need to apply this same level of scrutiny to the shots you choose to include in your photo essay. If something is out of place or (in the case of historical work) out of time, you can bet the audience will notice.

⬥ Consider Adding Text

While it isn’t necessary, a photographic essay can be more powerful by the addition of text. This is especially true of images with an interesting background story that can’t be conveyed through the image alone. If you don’t feel up to the task of writing content, consider partnering with another artist and allowing them tor bring your work to life.

Final Thoughts 

The world is waiting to tell us story after story. Through the best photo essays, we can capture the elements of those stories and create a photo essay that can invoke a variety of emotions in our audience.

No matter the type of cameras we choose, the techniques we embrace, or the topics we select, what really matters is that the photos say something about the people, objects, and events that make our world wonderful.

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5 Best Sites for Photo Essays and News in Pictures

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How to Move Windows to Another Drive: This Is the Easiest Method

Why windows tablets are finally back in 2024, did you know there are two different microsoft defender apps.

You know that you can read the news in a paper, listen to it on the radio, or watch it on TV. But not many know that you can also see what's happening around the world as photos or slideshows.

Journalistic photo essays have been around for some time now. Life magazine revolutionized this new style of consuming news and information. But now that Life has stopped, where should you go to see the news in an interesting new way ?

1. Time's LightBox for News, Life for Archives

Before we go further, you should know that all the archives of Life magazine's photo essays are available online. You can see them at Life.com , which is a subsidiary of Time magazine now.

Time itself has its own section for such photo essays, called LightBox . It's not always chronological, but it's always topical. The site covers everything from events like a mass shooting to journeys through different countries.

All the archives are completely free, and the site works well on both desktop and mobile. Have fun going through this one, especially the Life magazine portfolios. It's old, but it's still among the most intelligent content you can read today .

2. The Atlantic's In Focus

Photo editor Alan Taylor doesn't go out into the field himself. But he's an expert at picking gems from the works of others to tell a story. At The Atlantic , Taylor has access to several news agencies to construct these hand-curated essays.

The variety is mind-boggling. Taylor tells stories of war, of seasons, of travel, or disaster, of sports, of culture, and anything else he can think of. They are all large-sized photos that look good even on a high-resolution screen. Each picture also has its original caption. And there's a fullscreen slideshow option too. It's an immersive experience.

Taylor also collates the best photos in the news every week. It's a different way to catch up on what's happening across the world, as a single picture and a caption tells the story. In Focus is an excellent example of the quality you get when real humans curate content .

3. Boston Big Picture

Before In Focus , Alan Taylor started the Boston Big Picture photo blog at The Boston Globe . It has the same format, themes, and ideas. Some of the topical essays also repeat, but there is enough new stuff to visit both.

The original blog to support photojournalism, Big Picture continues to deliver quality updates every week. Again, you will get high-resolution photos that are highlighted above all else. Captions will tell you what you need to know about it.

A favorite is the "Globe Staff's best of the month" which marries photojournalism and street photography. It's the kind of blog that teaches you to be a great photographer , while still entertaining you.

4. Reuters Full Focus

In a time of fake news, for those who want trustworthy news through photos, turn to Reuters. The global news agency's dedicated page has striking photojournalism covering myriad topics.

The blog features both styles of web photo essays. Established photojournalists get single-topic essays of their own. Meanwhile, Reuters photo editors also create slideshows from the works of the entire team. This adds a lot of depth to coverage of areas like the conflict in the Middle East, or a disaster like the recent Hurricane Maria.

Like all the other sites, you can view a slideshow in fullscreen mode, or expand all images on a single web page. Fair warning, the site takes a long time to load, but it's worth it.

5. Al Jazeera's In Pictures

Even as a long-time fan of Alan Taylor, my personal favorite news photo blog today is Al Jazeera's In Pictures . It effortlessly combines news events and interesting non-news features.

As you probably know, Al Jazeera is a leading news site that prides itself on being independent and free of censorship . So such uncensored photos can sometimes be a little hard to stomach. Look out for warnings in case the pictures will be traumatic.

It is also the most regularly updated site among all these photo blogs. The gamut of topics is also wide and varied. Bookmark this one, you'll want to come back to it often.

Do You Read, Watch, or Listen to News?

The news is getting difficult to trust these days. It's almost like the onus is on you to fact-check and verify the news , not on the journalists themselves. Naturally, you will end up finding someone you trust and stick with them.

How do you prefer to get your news these days? Do you like to watch video clips on social networks, YouTube, or a proper news channel on TV? Are you a reader who relies on newspapers and websites? Or are you that rare radio and podcast listener?

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The Best And Most Influential Photographers Of All Time

Photography is so much more than just pressing a button. The greatest photographers spend their entire lives mastering and perfecting their craft. A Great photograph is one that makes a lasting impression on those who view it. When executed with great care, photography can evoke deep emotions and tell complex stories. The following is a list of some of the best and most influential photographers of all time. Their work is extraordinary and their discipline impeccable. In no particular order, I present to you some of the greatest photographers the world has ever known. Don't forget to check out my fine art photography gallery after you read this article.

Elliot Erwitt

"it's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. you can find pictures anywhere. it's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. you just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy".

It is without a doubt that Elliot Erwitt is one of the greatest photographers to ever pick up a camera. His work is a commentary on what it means to be human. His photographs capture life’s ironic, comedic and sometimes absurd moments in a way that is both brilliant and surprising. Erwitt’s images are perfect slivers of time that are spontaneous yet very deliberately and carefully composed. With a particular fondness for dogs, Elliot published not one, but four books on canines.

Elliot Erwitt was born in Paris France in 1928 and emigrated to the United States in 1939. As a teenager in Los Angeles California, Elliot became interested in photography and began working in a commercial darkroom before enrolling in Los Angeles City College where he would further his study of the craft. In 1951 he was drafted by the US military and worked as a photographer while being stationed in Germany and France. In 1953 Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and became president of the organization for three years in the 1960’s. Erwitt worked as a freelance photographer for publications such as Collier’s, Look, LIFE and Holiday.

Between the years of 1972 and 2018 Erwitt released 26 photographic books. If you’d like to explore Elliot Erwitt’s work, I highly recommend his books “Personal Best” and “Personal Exposures” .

Steve McCurry

"it’s important for you to spend your time photographing things that matter to you. you need to understand the things that have meaning to you, and not what others think is important for you.".

With a career spanning over four decades, Steve McCurry has captured some of the most iconic images of humanity. His striking imagery often involves his subject staring directly into the camera’s lens with a piercing gaze. Rich yet natural colors complement his scenes and help tell the story of the people within them.

McCurry’s photographs exhibit the rich diversity of the human race across the globe. When you look at a Steve McCurry photograph, you feel as if you are standing where the image was taken. It’s almost as if you could have a conversation with the person on the other side of the lens. When photography feels as touching as McCurry’s, the world becomes a little smaller and the viewer begins to understand the beauty in diversity. It is impossible not to feel a connection when observing his work and because of that, he is one of the greatest photographers of all time.

Born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Steve gained an interest in photography when he began taking images for the Penn State newspaper. After College Steve traveled to India to document the country with his camera. In May of 1979 Steve crossed over into Pakistan where he met some Afghan refugees who asked him to document the civil war that was underway in their homeland. The refugees helped smuggle him into Afghanistan where he spent several months living with and documenting the Majahideen fighters who were organizing to resist a coup takeover that took place the year before. Due to the closed borders, Steve’s images were some of the first to show the brutality of the soviet backed war.

His early images paved the way for a photojournalism career that would land his work on the cover of National Geographic multiple times. In 1985, his cover image “Afgan Girl” was published and has become known as the most recognized image in the magazine’s history.

McCurry has published 21 books over the course of 35 years. These books contain some of the most iconic photos ever taken. Popular books include Steve McCurry: A Life in Pictures , Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs and In Search of Elsewhere: Unseen Images .

Paul Nicklen

“gear is the least important part of the equation. having a vision and being able to articulate an idea visually are much more important.”.

Paul Nicklen is one of the hardest working wildlife photographers on the planet. His close proximity imagery shows nature in a way that is rarely seen. The majority of Paul’s images come from the polar regions where he spends much of his time under the water photographing Leopard Seals, whales, penguins and other marine life.

Nicklen has had eleven stories published in National Geographic and opened up the Paul Nicklen Gallery in Soho New York. Paul is not only an incredible photographer but he is also a champion of the natural world and a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers .

In 2017 Nicklen and his wife Cristina Mittermeier founded Sea Legacy with a mission to preserve the ocean while educating the public about how human impact is affecting the environment and all of the living things within it.

I highly recommend his books “Born to Ice” and “Polar Obsession”

Don McCullin

Website “photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. if you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”.

Don McCullin is one of the most brilliant social photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is best known for his war images and for his work documenting the poverty of London’s East side. McCullin’s work exhibits masterful compositions that effectively tell a narrative. His photographs from war and poverty torn countries are as technically good as they are heart-breaking. It is impossible not to feel something when looking at his work which is why he is such an effective photographer. His war scenes are as truthfully dark as war itself. He has been shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon.

Later in life Don mostly focused on less violent subjects including documenting the English countryside and producing elegant still life photographs. In 2017 McCullin was knighted by the Queen of England for his service to Photography.

The Books Don McCullin and In England showcase McCullins most celebrated images and are a great addition to any collection.

Nick Brandt

"your actions, no matter how small, can energize and focus you. those of us who care must continue to do our damnedest to minimize the damage as best we can. to keep on fighting for all in the here and now, and for those beings that come after us.".

Alice, Stanley and Najin, Kenya 2020, from The Day May Break: Chapter One. © Nick Brandt

Nick Brandt has created some of the most important photographs of the 21st century. His climate-based work is deeply thought provoking, compositionally striking and deeply poetic. Born in 1964 in the UK, his work initially focused on the rapidly disappearing natural world due to environmental destruction, climate change and human actions. In recent years, his photographic series' have focused on the growing impacts of climate breakdown for humans.

In 2021 Brandt began an ongoing global series called “The Day May Break”. The series portrays people and animals together in a smoke filled environment causing the viewer to reflect on the real-life consequences of climate change. Brandt channels his outrage into quiet determination, resulting in a portrait of humanity at a critical moment in the Anthropocene.

In 2023, Brandt released “SINK / RISE”. The series was photographed in Fiji and is the third chapter of “The Day My Break”. “SINK / RISE” focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. The series is an intimate collection of people photographed underwater in the ocean. The people are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades due to sea rise.

All of Nick’s photographs are shot in camera. He does not use photoshop or ai to place people and animals together.

Nick Brandt has an incredible collection of beautifully produced & signed photography books available for purchase on his website. Recommended books include The Day May Break: Chapter One , This Empty World & Across The Ravaged Land .

Jerry Uelsmann

“let us not be afraid to allow for “post-visualization.” by post-visualization i refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to re-visualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process.”.

Jerry Uelsmann was truly a photographer ahead of his time. When we think of image manipulation we often think of digital images and Photoshop, but Jerry was combining multiple images together in the darkroom long before the days of computer editing. Jerry is known for his surreal and dreamlike gelatin-silver print photomontages. His photographs combine incredible darkroom precision with unbridled creativity that results in highly captivating fine art prints

Uelsmann spent his entire professional life dedicated to the arts. In 1960 he began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville and in 1974 he became a graduate research professor at the same university.

If you like to see more of Jerry’s incredible images check out his book Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective .

Joal Sartore

“the most memorable photos are layered, in good light, and have something really interesting going on in them. if you can get all three elements into a single frame, now you're talking.”.

Joal Sartore’s specialty is documenting endangered species and landscapes across the world. He is a master of animal portraiture which can be seen in his 25 year project The Photo Ark. The Photo Ark is a quest to document every single living species living in zoos and wildlife refugees across the globe. Joal photographs most of the animals in a studio setting with strobes just as any portrait photographer would do so in one of their shoots. The focus of his project is to educate the public about wildlife and the threats that it faces. His animal portraits are absolutely remarkable.

In addition to photography, Joal is a conservationist, author, speaker and teacher. He is a National Geographic photographer with 40 stories published in the magazine. Joal sells a wide variety of books including The Photo Ark book on his website and can be purchased here.

Dorothea Lange

“to know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.”.

Dorothea Lange is best known for her work for the Farm Security Administration during the great depression. Lange is important in photographic history because her work influenced the development of documentary photography. Throughout the course of her career she documented important social issues throughout the United States including the forced removal of Japanese Americans by the federal government during World War II. At the time, the government impounded most of Lang’s work of the internment process.

Today her photography of the evacuations and interments are available in the National Archives as well as in her book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment . If you like a definitive book that spans Lang’s career read Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures

“I never think about a shoot before I do it. Because there's no formula for people. What I try to do is to strip everything away rather than go in with preconceived notions. If I do that, I might miss a gem or a jewel that the person is offering me.”

Platon is famous for his close up and intimate portraiture with clean backgrounds. He often shoots just slightly below eye level to give his subjects a dominating look. Platon’s work includes some of the world’s most famous and prominent people. His subjects span a gamut of backgrounds from world leaders and business people to musicians and movie stars. Some of his most notable portraits include Barack Obama, Stephen Hawking, Spike Lee, Vladimir Putin and Muammar Gaddafi. Time Magazine has a really great article titled The Craziest Man in the Room about Platon’s experience photographing one of the world’s most dangerous dictators.

Over the years, Platon has produced images for Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ and the New Yorker. Platon’s most recent work has been centered around civil and human rights. In 2009 he teamed up with the organization Human Rights Watch to help celebrate those who stand up for equal rights and justice in countries that suppress those freedoms. In 2013 Platon founded a non-profit called The People’s Portfolio. The organization's mission is to enlist the public to build support for human rights around the world.

Platon has released four books on his work including Platon’s Republic , Power , and Service , A book that highlights the men and Women in the US military.

Gordon Parks

“i feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. what the eye sees is its own. what the heart can perceive is a very different matter.”.

Gordon Parks is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century and was the first African American photographer to be hired by Life Magazine. Even though Parks was completely self taught, he received limited success as soon as he picked up the camera. His work was praised by the clerks who developed his first roll of film and encouraged him to seek out a fashion shoot. Parks went on to build a portrait business in Chicago while he simultaneously began to document the experience of African Americans. This work lead him to win the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942 that would ultimately land him a job for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. and later, the Office of War Information (OWI). Parks most important work consistently explored the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination in the US.

Outside of photography Parks was a musician, writer, painter, poet and filmmaker. In 1969,Parks became the first African American to write and direct a Hollywood feature film titled The Learning Tree. In 1971, Park released the critically acclaimed film Shaft.

Parks continued to work as a documentary and commercial photographer until his death in 2006.

Books by Gordon Parks include Gordon Parks: The New Tide: Early Work 1940–1950 and Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

Annie Leibovitz

“the camera makes you forget you're there. it's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”.

Annie Leibovitz is one of the best known portrait photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is most famous for her celebrity portraiture which includes Mick Jagger, Angelina Jolie and the Queen of England. Her polaroid portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was taken five hours before John Lennon was murdered. That photograph is Rolling Stone's most famous cover photo. The Library of Congress declared her a living legend and she became the first woman to have an exhibition in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery.

Leibovitz studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute but switched her major to photography after taking her first photography course. In 1973 Leibovitz landed a job as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine where she would photograph countless celebrities and help define the magazine's look for ten years. In 1975 she went on tour with The Rolling Stones as their concert photographer where she produced one of her most famous portraits of Mick Jagger in an elevator.

Leibovitz landed a gig with Vanity Fair Magazine in 1983 where she worked as a photographer until 2000. Today she continues to work as a portrait photographer and educator. Recommended books by Leibovitz include Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970–1983 and Photographs Annie Leibovitz 1970 -1990

Phillipe Helmsman

“i never was an apprentice or assistant to another photographer. everything that i know i learned by trial and error and by a lot of experimenting. i consider every assignment as a problem and my picture as its solution. i don’t belong to photographers who shoot out of instinct. a lot of thinking goes into my taking--or should i say making of -- pictures”.

Creative is an understatement when describing Phillipe Helmsman’s work. He would go through great length to create photographs and concepts that had never been seen before. His concepts often required elaborate setups and creative positioning of the camera. He photographed social figures including Elbert Einstein, Richard Nixon and Clint Eastwood and is one of greatest portrait photographers of his time.

Later in his career, Helmsman began suspending his subject in mid air by asking them to jump right before he hit the shutter button. Many of these images are compiled in his book Jump. The concept behind Jump was that when a person is preoccupied with jumping in the air they are no longer paying attention to what the camera is doing.

In 1941, Helmsman met Salvidor Dali and the two became good friends. They collaborated on projects together for over 30 years. The two most famous photographs from their session are “ Dali Atomicus ” and “In Voluptas Mors” or Voluptuous Death.

Edward Weston

“consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.”.

Born in 1886, Edward Weston was one of the most influential and innovative photographers of his time. His subjects mostly included portraits, nudes, still life and landscapes. For the first twenty years of his career he calculated exposures based on estimation of his previous experience. Weston gained acclaim with his nudes but he began to shift his focus after the artist Henrietta Shore gave him honest feedback, explaining that he was taking too many nudes and the images had lost their spark. Weston looked to her work for inspiration and began creating some of his most famous photographs including Nautilus , (1927) and Pepper No 30 , (1930). It was around this same time that Weston began to focus on landscape photography. Weston was introduced to Ansel Adams by their mutual friend and photographer Willard Van Dyke. Adams and Weston would go on to become great friends and would take many photographic trips together. In 1937 Weston became the first photographer to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to travel the US and focus on his landscape photography.

Today, Weston’s photographs are some of the most expensive ever sold with “ The Nude” selling for $1.6 million dollars in 2008.

Recommended books include "Edward Weston" and " Edward Weston: The Early Years "

Frans Lanting

“i think a photograph, of whatever it might be - a landscape, a person - requires personal involvement. that means knowing your subject, not just snapping at what’s in front of you.”.

Frans Lanting is one of the great wildlife and nature photographers of recent time. His work spans more than three decades with a focus on the preservation of our planet and all of the species that call it home. Lanting is a frequent contributor to National Geographic and was the photographer in residence of the magazine for some time. He is also a member of the photo society.

In 2006 Lanting launched "Life: A Journey Through Time". The project represents a vision of life on earth from the big band to present day. Lanting has said the Life project was a synthesis of his career and was released as a book, exhibition as well as a multimedia symphony with music by Phillip Glass.

Frans Lanting has a selection of eight photography books on his website that are dedicated to this great planet that we call home.

W. Eugene Smith

“passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.".

Pittsburgh steel worker 1955 - W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith is often regarded as the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay. Throughout his career as a photographer Smith worked for Newsweek, Flying Magazine and Life. He was seen as stubborn by editors due to his powerful drive and vision. Early in his career he was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use a medium format camera.

Smith was a well known war photographer during World War II. He provided images for Ziff-Davis Publishing and Life magazine at that time. In 1945 he was seriously injured while photographing the Battle of Okinawa in Japan.

In the late 40’s Smith began to focus on photo essays with a humanist photography perspective. These photo essays consists of some of Smith’s fines work and are a large part of his legacy.

Some of Smith’s most notable essays and photographs include “Country Doctor” (1948) “ Nurse-Midwife” (1951) and “Pittsburgh Project” (1955). The Pittsburgh Project was considered by Smith as his greatest work.

Notable Books by W. Eugene Smith Dream Street: W Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965 and W.Eugene Smith : Photographs, 1934-75

David Yarrow

“it’s a combination of trial and error, by getting it wrong, you learn how to get it right.”.

David Yarrow is a wildlife and fine art photographer based out of London. His work takes on two forms. The first is that of traditional wildlife photography but often from very low angles to emphasize the animal that he is photographing. The second form is cinematic photographs that appear to be out of a strange wild west movie. These images often involve models interacting with seemingly wild animals such as wolves, cougars and lions. His concepts are well thought out, beautiful and sometimes shocking. Books by David Yarrow include Wild Encounters: Iconic Photographs of the World's Vanishing Animals and Cultures and West: The American Cowboy .

Ansel Adams

“landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.”.

What would a greatest photographers of all time list be without Ansel Adams? Ansel Adams is perhaps the most well known photographer in the world and is responsible for some of the most iconic images of the United States National Parks. The Yosemite Sierra Nevada engulfed his entire being at an early age and could be considered one of the greatest influences in his photographic career. In 1919 Adams joined the Sierra Club while becoming the hut keeper for The Leconte Memorial Lodge. The Sierra Club became responsible for Adam’s early photographic success as they published his images in the club’s 1922 bulletin and offered him a one person show at the club’s headquarters in San Francisco. Adams would eventually serve on the Sierra Club’s board of directors for 37 years.

Adam’s work was elevated when he met Albert M. Bender who was patron of the arts and published Adam’s first portfolio. Adam’s would go on to become friends and work with many of his era’s most celebrated photographers and artists including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe and more. One cannot fully appreciate landscape photography without fully appreciating Ansel Adams.

Adam’s published many books over the course of his career, Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs is a beautiful book that covers the gamut of his works. If you’re interested in learning more about Ansel Adam’s life and photographic story, the book Ansel Adams: An Autobiography is absolutely fantastic. Adams goes into detailed and sometimes humorous stories from his entire life. I cannot recommend this book enough.

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DIGITAL PHOTO MENTOR

Photography tips, tutorials and guides for Beginner and Intermediate Photographers.

20 of the Most Famous Photographs in History

by Darlene Hildebrandt | Last Updated: November 5, 2022

This collection of 20 famous photographs has been carefully chosen because of their importance in history. Each one of these iconic images has helped shape our history and alter the world which we live in. They are some of the most powerful and influential images ever captured by some of the most famous photographers in history.

Images have a way of cutting through and triggering an immediate emotional response like nothing else can. They open a window for us to view the world through the eyes of the photographer.

Photography has helped to reinforced history making it more tangible and real. It has also made the camera an important tool not only to document history but also to help change it.

#1 Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photo Man Jumping the Puddle | 1930

In this, one of his most iconic photos, Henri Cartier-Bresson captured a scene through a fence behind the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris.

This image became the perfect example of what Cartier-Bresson referred to as “The Decisive Moment” .

“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” Henri Cartier-Bresson

The French photographer is often referred to as the father of modern photojournalism.

He coined the term “The Decisive Moment” to refer to a moment when the photographer captures a fleeting second , immortalizing it in time.

#2 The famous photo The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz | 1907

“I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me.” Alfred Stieglitz

One of the most famous photographers of the early 20th Century, Stieglitz fought for photography to be taken as seriously as painting as a valid art form. His pioneering work helped to change the way many viewed photography. His NYC galleries featured many of the best photographers of the day.

His iconic image “The Steerage” not only encapsulates what he called straight photography  – offering a truthful take on the world. It also gives us a more complex and multi-layered viewpoint that conveys abstraction through the shapes in the image. And how those shapes relate to one another.

Note: Many years ago one of my instructors at my photography program in college showed us The Steerage and talked about how important it was, how significant. The 21-year-old version of myself didn’t get it.

I admit it took me many years to understand its genius and its message. So if you don’t “get” it right off the bat you’re in good company.

#3 Stanley Forman’s famous photo Woman Falling From Fire Escape |1975

Forman was a well-known photographer working for the Boston Herald when he attended the scene of a fire. What began as him documenting the rescue of a young woman and child quickly took a turn when the fire escape collapsed.

The pair began to fall and he continued shooting as they were falling. He capturing them swimming through the air. Forman only lowered his camera and turned at the last moment when he realized what he was witnessing was a woman plummeting to her death.

This famous photograph won Forman a Pulitzer prize . But its interesting legacy is the ethical questions it raised about when a photographer should stop shooting and whether it is appropriate to publish disturbing images. It also caused many municipalities to enforce stricter fire-escape safety codes, so you decide.

Read Also: 12 Famous Portrait Photographers You Need To Know

#4 Kevin Carter’s controversial photo – Starving Child and Vulture | 1993

This image is another Pulitzer Prize-winning image . As famous for its social impact, as it is the ethical issues it raised.

In 1993 South African photojournalist Kevin Carter traveled to Sudan to photograph the famine. His image of a collapsed child, with a vulture stalking over her, not only caused public outrage because of the horrific subject. It also stirred up a lot of criticism directed toward the photographer , for photographing the child, rather than helping her.

That day, and the onslaught that came after continued to haunt Carter until he took his own life in 1994 .

For the record, the mother was apparently right next to the scene and the child was never in danger of being attacked by the bird. Notice that it was also shot with a longer telephoto lens which makes a scene look more compressed, making the bird appear closer to the child than reality.

If you want to learn more about this image and more shot by photojournalists in South Africa during the fall of Apartheid, check out The Bang Bang Club . Watch the trailer below, and you can watch the full movie on YouTube for $3.99. It’s a great documentary, but not for the faint of heart.

#5 Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams | Saigon Execution | 1968

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Eddie Adams was on the streets of Saigon on the 1st February 1968 photographing the devastation of the war.

Believing he was witnessing a routine execution of a prisoner. He looked through the viewfinder of his camera, to capture the scene. But what he captured was the casual assassination of the prisoner.

This iconic photo became one of the most powerful images of the Vietnam War . It helped fuel the anti-war movement and end US involvement in the war because it brought to life in a horrific visual, the magnitude of the violence occurring.

#6 Yousuf Karsh’s iconic portrait – Winston Churchill | 1941

“By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph.” Yousuf Karsh

In the wake of the attack on pearl harbor, Churchill arrived in Ottawa , to thank the allies for their assistance.

Unaware that a photographer had been commissioned to take his portrait he refused to remove his cigar. Once the photographer was set up he walked towards Churchill, removed the cigar from his mouth and took his famous photograph with the scowl.

Of the incident, Churchill told Karsh “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.”

This image is one of the most widely reproduced political portraits. It gave photographers permission to take more honest, and even critical, portraits of political leaders.

#7 Nick Ut | The Terror of War | 1972

“The horror of the Vietnam War recorded by me did not have to be fixed.” Nick Ut

25 miles northwest of Saigon, war photographer Nick Ut, captured one of the most harrowing images in the history of the Vietnam War . More often than not, the faces of those who suffer through the collateral damage of war are not seen.

But the harrowing image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc forced the world to see. A victim of mistakenly dropped napalm, she was later helped by Ut and received lifesaving treatment.

At the time of publication in 1972 many Newspapers had to relax their policies on nudity. The image remains controversial to this day, recently it was briefly removed from Facebook for the same reasons.

Nick Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for this famous image in 1973.

#8 Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photograph – Gandhi and the Spinning Wheel | 1946

In 1946 Margaret Bourke-White , LIFE magazine’s first female photographer, was offered a rare opportunity to photograph Mahatma Gandhi. This dream opportunity quickly turned into a nightmare. She was made to overcome many challenges before gaining access to India’s ideological leader. Including to spin Gandhi’s famous homespun.

After two failed shoots, thanks to technical difficulties, it was third time lucky for Bourke-White.

This iconic image of Gandhi at his spinning wheel was captured less than two years before his assassination.

#9 Lewis Hine’s famous image – Cotton Mill Girl | 1908

Established in 1904, the National Child Labor Committee, existed to fight for the rights of child workers in the USA. They realized that the most powerful tool they had was to show the real face of these children. They believed that seeing these images of child labor would awaken the citizens to demand change.

When Lewis Hine, an investigative photographer, came across Sadie Pfeifer, one of the smallest children at work. Standing at just 48 inches, he knew he had a shot that would change peoples views.

This photograph along with others was a crucial part of the campaign which led to a change in legislation . The outcome of which was a 50% cut in the number of child laborers over a 10 year period.

#10 Blind Beggar by Paul Strand | 1916

Paul Strand’s groundbreaking image of a blind woman was a candid portrait that departed from the more formal posed portraits of that time .

Strand not only captured a moment in time, when a country was changing rapidly, due to an immigration surge. But he also took the first image that paved the way for a new style – street photography .

#11 The Iconic V-J Day in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt | 1945

“People tell me that when I’m in heaven, they will remember this picture.” Alfred Eisenstaedt

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s mission through this photograph was to “to find and catch the storytelling moment.” In this post-WWII photograph in Times Square, he did just that.

His famous photograph of the soldier and dental nurse has become one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, signifying the joyous end to years of war.

#12 The first photograph in history – by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce – View from the Window at Le Gras |circa 1826

Interestingly the first permanent photograph ever taken was not by an artist, but by inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His fascination with printing led him to set up a camera obscura at his studio in France in 1826.

The window scene was cast on a pewter plate and presented a crude copy of the scene outside his window. It was an 8-hour exposure and there is only one copy , a positive image. This is why the image is somewhat confusing because the sun had moved across the courtyard during the exposure, causing shadows on both sides to appear.

His groundbreaking work paved the way for the development of modern photography.

#13 James Nachtwey | Famine in Somalia | 1992

“Dare we say that it doesn’t get any worse than this?” New York Times Magazine reader upon seeing Nachtwey’s image

Unable to get an assignment to document the 1992 famine in Somalia photojournalist James Nachtwey decided to go alone.

Supported on the ground by the Red Cross, Nachtwey captured the horrors of the famine . This, his most haunting image captures a woman in a wheelbarrow waiting to be taken to a feeding center.

After the publication of his harrowing images the Red Cross received the biggest wave of public support since WWII and were able to save ONE and a half million people .

#14 Alberto Korda’s iconic photo of Che Guevara, Guerillero Heroico | 1960

Little did photographer Alberto Korda realize when it took two frames of Fidel Castro’s young associate, as an afterthought, that it would become such an iconic image.

Upon his death 7 years later his portrait of Che Guevara would become the iconic image of rebellion and revolution for people around the world. Even still today it is prevalent in the Cuban culture and around the world. Controversial as Che was, whether you consider him a hero or a villain, the portrait stands the test of time.

#15 Philippe Halsman | Dalí Atomicus | 1948

Philippe Halsman’s life’s work was to capture the essence of those he photographed. Knowing a standard portrait of the flamboyant Salvador Dali was not going to wash, he set out to create something extraordinary.

Halsman even roped in his wife and daughter to assist in throwing the cats and water into the frame. After 26 shots they finally captured this image that has echoes of Dali’s own artwork in it. Note: Remember that was all film so had to be done in a single frame, there was no Photoshop!

Halsman and Dali both had an unusual sense of style and creativity – some might even say bizarre. They collaborated on many projects together including Halsman recreating one of Dali’s painting of a skull using human nude figures.

Halsman helped to shape modern-day portrait photography. His images of Dali, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Alfred Hitchcock broke the mold and encouraged photographers to collaborate with their subjects .

#16 Dorothea Lange | Migrant Mother | 1936

On assignment for the Resettlement Administration,  Dorothea Lange was tasked to capture the plight of those most affected by the Great Depression in 1936.

Lang tightly framed 32-year-old Thompson and her young children drawing the viewer into the pain and exhausting etched on her face which appears aged beyond her years.

Upon her return, Lange’s, now famous photograph, became the most iconic image of the 160,000 taken to document this desperate time.

The government acted upon seeing the suffering and sent 20,000 pounds of food.

#17 Eadweard Muybridge | The Horse in Motion | 1878

Embarking on a task to discover whether a horse takes flight when galloping. Photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by California governor Leland Stanford to prove his theory.

Muybridge developed a technique to capture the horse using an exposure lasting just a fraction of a second. He had 12 cameras lined up that were triggered to photograph in rapid succession by the galloping horse.

The series of images Muybridge captured didn’t just prove that a horse does indeed take flight. They also led the way for a new way of using photography with other technology to capture the truth.

This method led the way for the development of animation and motion pictures.

#18 W. Eugene Smith | Country Doctor | 1948

“I do not seek to possess my subject but rather to give myself to it,” W. Eugene Smith

Smith’s aim was to see the world from the perspective of his subjects and for the viewers looking at his work to do the same. This image is taken from his photo Essay “Country Doctor” was taken after Smith had spent 23 days with the subject.

Following the doctor around and really getting to know him, Smith was able to capture the essence of his subject through a single frame. This image and accompanying essay became a template for the form which many have emulated since.

But the image was part of the large photo essay which set a new standard for this genre of photography, photojournalism.

#19 Robert Capa | The Falling Soldier | 1936

Capa’s image of a Spanish militiaman being shot was taken without him ever looking through his viewfinder.

Captured by holding his camera above his head while in the trenches this image took war photography to a different level. Soon after, journalists began to be formally embedded into army units as their importance in capturing and documenting the horrors of war was realized.

#20 Harold Edgerton | Milk Drop Coronet | 1957

Electrical-engineering professor Edgerton began a series of experiments in his MIT lab, inventing a camera that would photograph a fleeting moment in the dark .

Combining high-tech strobe lighting and a camera shutter that would enable the photographer to capture a moment invisible to the naked eye. He set up a milk dropper next to a timer along with his camera.

His stop-motion photograph was able to freeze the impact of a drop of milk on a table and cemented photography’s importance in the world of advancing the human understanding of our physical world.

Keep studying

I want to remind you these are just 20 of the many really important images that have been created over the years. There are so many more significant photo and photographers, so I encourage you to continue reading and researching.

For starters, you can read about 12 Famous Portrait Photographers from History that You Need to Know and also 25 of the most famous photographers from the past who’ve taken the iconic photos you’re familiar with (or maybe not.)

Please share your favorite famous images in the comments below, and tell us how it’s significant and why it’s important to you.

About Darlene Hildebrandt

Darlene is an educator who teaches aspiring amateurs and hobbyists how to improve their skills through her articles here on Digital Photo Mentor, her beginner photography course , and private tutoring lessons . To help you at whatever level you're at she has two email mini-courses. Sign up for her free beginner OR portrait photography email mini-course . Or get both, no charge!

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The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time

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“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

If any eight words could sum up the best Western movies in their entirety, it’s those from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” At times misunderstood, at times marginalized, at times written off by Hollywood as less than bankable even following periods of extraordinary success, the Western is nonetheless the most enduring genre in the history of American movies. Assembling IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time resulted in movies appearing there that represent every single decade since the turn of the last century: The earliest film on the list is from 1903 and the most recent from 2023, with movies from five continents represented.

That endurance is not just because of sagebrush and spurs and cowboy hats and horses and train robberies and six-shooters, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. It’s because the best Western movies — whether modern Westerns or those made a century ago — are unparalleled vehicles for ideas about what America is, what it represents, how it was founded, and all the hypocrisies and contradictions and agreed-upon myths therein. Ideas so powerful they inspired reflection among filmmakers from other nations using that cinematic grammar about what their own cultures’ say about themselves too. (The Soviet bloc even made a series of “Osterns” using the imagery of the Western, sometimes displaced to the steppes of Central Asia, to tell their own stories about themselves.) Even unintentionally on many occasions, this is a genre that looks, more than any other, dead-on at race, gender, capitalism, environmentalism, colonialism, and the deepest question of all: Who are you really when there’s no or little authority hanging over you to mediate your behavior? When you don’t have all the creature comforts of civilization? What would you become?

Is that, deep down, who you are already?

That’s why, even though the Western is the ultimate American genre, the ultimate lens through which to examine America, it can even transcend it’s American-ness. Because above all: The Western is a genre about why people are the way that they are. And the many myths we tell ourselves about who we’d like to think we are.

In 1894, at his studio in New Jersey, Thomas Edison made short “actuality” films featuring stars of the touring “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show, such as Annie Oakley. 130 years later, the genre continues with Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga.” But even before those Edison shorts, Buffalo Bill’s traveling show had been touring the country for over a decade peddling its vision of what the Old West was like… as the Old West was actually happening. Mythmaking about the Old West was happening from the very start — there was a book written about Buffalo Bill in 1869 — simply because, more than anything, America loves to tell stories about itself. An obsession that Hollywood would deepen even so much more.

The Western, as an idea, as a vehicle for other ideas, was so potent that the rest of the world then picked it up. John Ford , as essential a driver of creating an idea of what America is as anyone ever was, influenced Akira Kurosawa, who found a grammar all his own to tell stories about Japan that, when you squint, look a bit like the Western. They’re distinctly not, of course, instead rooted in the traditions of jidaigeki , but Kurosawa’s films influenced Italy’s stunning explosion of Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s that brought an entirely different lens to the genre. A number of Spaghetti Westerns are on IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time, as is a Korean Western set in 1930s Manchuria, an Australian Western, and a couple of South American Westerns.

Assembling IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time resulted in a dawning awareness of the genre’s elasticity: There’s a sci-fi Western serial (doubling as a “singing cowboy” saga) in 1935’s “The Phantom Empire” that paved the way for “Nope.” There are avant-garde short-film takes on the Western, such as Carroll Ballard’s “Rodeo.” There are Westerns set at the time of those films’ actual release, such as “Paris, Texas,” that nonetheless feature journey and reunion motifs central to films set 100 years earlier. There’s the fact that, as much as Black experiences in the Old West have been marginalized by Hollywood (even though around a third of all cowboys in the Old West were Black) there have been many more Black Westerns than are typically acknowledged by the canon today — and that it’s on us now in the present to appreciate what those films have offered. And there’s the realization of iconoclastic, even form-busting, storytelling elements we’ve taken for granted in canonical classics: Which is to say, paraphrasing Robin Wood, that if you don’t love “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” in “Rio Bravo,” you don’t love movies.

Read on and enjoy, pardner.

This Top 100 Westerns list is a living document and will be added to over time to go beyond 100. With editorial contributions from Tom Brueggemann, Bill Desowitz, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Marya E. Gates, Jim Hemphill, Ryan Lattanzio, Tony Maglio, Tambay Obenson, Harrison Richlin, Sarah Shachat, Anne Thompson, Brian Welk, and Christian Zilko.

100. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (dir. Michael Cimino, 1980)

We know what you’re thinking. ‘Heaven’s Gate’? The film widely associated with the end of the American independent cinema movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s? Really? Yes. There are many versions of this much maligned relic of cinema’s history, but the one we recommend is the latest cut, currently available through the Criterion Collection, ‘Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.’ The director’s full and final vision is a masterpiece on every level — a Western that’s as rich and textured as a Renaissance painting. A historical triptych that tracks wealth’s grip on the American soul, a soul born out of a European influence, now desperate to be excised, but that time carries on in new forms. 

The cost overruns on Cimino’s production famously helped tank United Artists, but it should not be viewed through that lens alone. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ is not only a work of art, but a vital historical document. Its examination of the Johnson County War — one of many forgotten genocides committed on American soil — and those involved with its tragic outcomes remains a relevant study of power bastardizing America’s promise of free enterprise. — HR 

99. ‘The Gunfighter’ (dir. Henry King, 1950)

Most of the action of this small-scale Western takes place in a saloon. One might call this setting a frontier courtroom, where community gathers, past offenses are deliberated, and the life of a man hangs in the balance. The main character of ‘The Gunfighter’ — a criminal named Jimmy Ringo whose myth has grown beyond his control — has seen many a saloon and been forced to deliver justice within them just as often, but is growing more and more tired by the second. Why does this space that’s supposed to be for leisure and relaxation always have to turn into an arena? Part of Ringo knows he’s brought this on himself, but it doesn’t stop him from arguing his case for redemption and desire to make good with society by being a family man. 

There’s a ticking clock element to this drama, as at a previous saloon Ringo shot a man down and now his three brothers are heading his way. The town Ringo absconds to also happens to be full of decent folk who resent Ringo’s presence just as much and are willing to shoot him dead based on conjecture alone. So goes the struggle of being a gunfighter in the Old West. Everyone wants the reputation, but once you get it, it’s all you are. As played by screen legend Gregory Peck, Ringo is a tragic figure in desperate need of a break and who’s started to fear that it’ll only come with a bullet. As he tries to create another path for himself, he’s reminded of all the mistakes that led him to this place — in another saloon, in another town that doesn’t want him there. ‘The Gunfighter’ serves as a precursor to many of the psychological Westerns popularized in the 1950s, as well as an influence on more recent films of the genre, such as ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.’ —HR 

98. ‘City Slickers’ (dir. Ron Underwood, 1991)

Jack Palance won his lone Oscar for his supporting role of Curly in ‘City Slickers.’ If there was a Best Cow Academy Award, Norman would have had it in the bag. Well, Best Calf — Norman didn’t age great. ‘City Slickers’ is a heartfelt buddy comedy in which Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby, faced with turning the big 4-0, leave their yuppie lives for a fantasy-camp cattle drive. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then Curly dies, the rain comes, and the west gets wild. The trip ceases to be a vacation (though to be honest it wasn’t super fun when Curly was alive either) when the guys must go it on their own. But in doing so, they learn Curly’s secret to life: Their ‘one thing.’ —TM

97. ‘The Professionals’ (dir. Richard Brooks, 1966)

Before ‘The Wild Bunch,’ there was Richard Brooks’ marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment: A prestigious film that earned two Oscar nominations for Brooks (director and adapted script) and cinematographer Conrad Hall. While it lacked the stylistic bravado and fatalistic doom of the legendary Sam Peckinpah Western, Brooks’ crack at the genre was action-packed (with a sequence aboard a fast-moving train) and philosophically insightful (with lots of sarcastic quips).  Oil baron Ralph Bellamy hires four soldiers of fortune to rescue his kidnapped wife (Claudia Cardinale) from revolutionary leader-turned bandit Jack Palance: Planner Lee Marvin, dynamite handler Burt Lancaster, wrangler Robert Ryan, and archer Woody Strode. Turns out Marvin and Lancaster were friends with Palance, and, sure enough, nothing is what it seems. Filmed mostly on location in Death Valley and near Lake Mead in Nevada, the 87-day shoot required lots of efficient planning and day-for-night shooting by Hall and his crew. Fittingly, it ends in disappointment for both Bellamy and Marvin. ‘You bastard!’ Bellamy declares. ‘Yes, sir, in my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man,’ Marvin replies. —BD

96. ‘The Cowboys’ (dir. Mark Rydell, 1972)

John Wayne’s last great performance, arguably, was as aging, embittered rancher Wil Andersen, who becomes a reluctant paternal figure in Mark Rydell’s gritty, progressive Western (one of the last of the ‘roadshow’ releases). It’s a coming-of-age adventure and modern portrayal of masculinity, beautifully shot by Robert Surtees and rousingly scored by John Williams, in which Andersen desperately hires 11 schoolboys (including newcomers Robert Carradine and A. Martinez) on a 400-mile cattle drive when his crew gets gold dust fever. Joining them is Roscoe Lee Browne’s scene-stealing Black cook, Nightlinger, who helps Andersen mentor the inexperienced kids. The themes of diversity and inclusion were topical in 1972, as was the violence, which received criticism for turning the kids into bloodthirsty killers. They exact revenge on psychotic Bruce Dern (Long Hair) and his gang of rustlers after he brutally murders Andersen by shooting him in the back and steals their cattle. It was a rare and shocking onscreen death for Wayne, which harmed Dern’s reputation as an actor, consigning him to a string of psychotic roles. For actor-turned director Rydell, it was a tough shoot with an ensemble cast of youngsters on location in New Mexico and Colorado. He even got off to a bad start when reprimanding Wayne for yelling ‘cut’ out of turn. Rydell was certain the superstar was going to have him fired, but Wayne respectfully apologized, and they got along well from then on. —BD

95. ‘The Daughter of Dawn’ (dir. Norbert A. Myles, 1920)

Director Norbert A. Myles’ historical epic ‘The Daughter of Dawn’ was filmed with a cast entirely composed of members of the Kiowa and Comanche tribes. Drawing on melodrama tropes, the film centers on the love quadrangle between the Kiowa chief’s daughter, Dawn (Esther LeBarre); White Eagle (White Parker, who was the actual son of Comanche leader Quanah Parker), the man she loves; Black Wolf (Jack Sankadota), the man her father wants her to marry; and Red Wing (Wanada Parker), another woman who loves Black Wolf. The film stands out from other Westerns of its time not only for its native cast, but also because it cements on celluloid pre-reservation era Kiowa and Comanche customs like buffalo hunts (the stunning footage of buffalos will move you to tears), ceremonial dances, and even a version of sign language, known as Plains Indian Sign Language, that allowed disparate tribes to communicate with each other.— MG

94. ‘Open Range’ (dir. Kevin Costner, 2003)

Directing his second Western after the triumph of ‘Dances With Wolves,’ Kevin Costner went darker and more inward to tell a riveting tale of revenge, though he didn’t leave his eye for beautiful landscapes behind. The setting for screenwriter Craig Storper’s story of free range cowboys (played by Costner, Robert Duvall, and Diego Luna) up against an evil rancher (Michael Gambon) is muddier and less superficially appealing than the lovely vistas of ‘Dances With Wolves,’ as Costner channels ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’-era Robert Altman to explore the specific, not always pretty, details of how people really lived in the Old West. Yet in this world Costner finds a different kind of beauty and creates visual poetry out of the makeshift town in which much of the film takes place. There’s also a wonderful attention to detail in the characterizations; Duvall is particularly entertaining, and there’s a quiet, adult poignancy to the romance between Costner and Annette Bening that places ‘Open Range’ on a par with the best Western novels of Larry McMurtry. —JH

93. ‘Tombstone’ (dir. George P. Cosmatos, 1993)

We’ll be your Huckleberry. ‘Tombstone’ is not the only film about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the OK Corral gunfight — it’s just the best one. (Well, other than ‘My Darling Clementine.’) It also came out at the right time — or at the very least, at not the wrong time. Kevin Costner’s ‘Wyatt Earp’ film was released in theaters just six months after ‘Tombstone.’ Costner would have had a better chance of beating Doc Holliday in a gunfight than beating ‘Tombstone’ at the box office. (‘Wyatt Earp’ made about half what ‘Tombstone’ did; ‘Tombstone’ was also the much-better-reviewed of the two.) In ‘Tombstone,’ Val Kilmer was particularly excellent as Holliday; decades later he’d play Wyatt Earp in ‘Wyatt Earp’s Revenge.’ Kurt Russell was (and always will be) our Wyatt Earp, and in this excellent and entertaining Western, he put a lot of cowboys beneath their own tombstones. —TM

92. ‘Little Woods’ (dir. Nia DaCosta, 2018)

‘Little Woods’ is a redefinition of the Western that situates its story in the contemporary American Midwest, a setting that starkly contrasts with the traditional locales of the Old West. Additionally, unlike classic Westerns that often focus on lawmen and outlaws, DaCosta’s confidently directed feature debut centers the trials of everyday survival faced by two sisters in a small North Dakota town.

What makes ‘Little Woods’ a compelling addition to a list of great Westerns is its exploration of frontier themes via the lens of present-day socioeconomic issues. The protagonists, believably played by Tessa Thompson and Lily James whose strong performances ground the film, contend with inadequate healthcare access, housing insecurity, poverty, and the opioid crisis, in an overall densely bleak atmosphere that gets underneath the skin.

Its ‘desperate times-desperate measures’ throughline does echo the lawlessness and moral ambiguity characteristic of Westerns, and DaCosta’s direction is subtle and nuanced. Its haunting score and stark cinematography enhance the desolation and harshness of this relatively underrepresented frontier. And its focus on stories of resilience and agency from the perspective of women in front of and behind the camera updates the genre’s scope, and challenges the typical vision of the West as a place of clear-cut masculine conflicts and resolutions. —TO

91. ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’ (dir. William Wellman, 1943)

‘There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience’ is part of a letter that Henry Fonda reads aloud at the end of ‘The Ox-Bow Incident.’ William Wellman’s searing lynch mob movie is about exactly how men come to ignore their conscience, and what happens when they do. This is a dark Western, not just in tone but in look, too, taking place mostly over a long night of some townsfolk trying to find and hang murderous cattle rustlers; it eventually settles in a forsaken stretch of ground with the burnt-out shell of a building and gnarled trees beside a small creek that may as well be the River Styx. The shadows are long; the mist roils through the night; the way the light hits the assembled posse’s faces on Wellman’s slow, patient closeups brings out fear, hypocrisy, posturing. The very beauty of the frame-in-frame compositions separating the mob from the men they accuse feels like a slap in the face.     Every cinematic tool is bent toward anger at the kind of arrogant machismo that leads us into mob justice. And there’s a furious precision in how the story is constructed, too. Each character actor, and each type they play, implicates a piece of our civilization. Fonda is the name that most people will know, playing a cool outsider who is unconvinced by the posse’s actions and whose star image promises us that eventually he will step up and shame them all back into line. Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn, as two of the hapless men ensnared by the mob, exude an inner-strength and decency. But it’s not about decency, or innocence. ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’ is about how relying on Western justice is no justice at all. The fact that it does so inside of a tautly suspenseful Western is all the more impressive, and all the more damning. —SS 

90. ‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird’ (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2008)

‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird’ isn’t just in conversation with Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns by way of 1930s Manchuria. It takes the template Leone built, pours gasoline over it, and explodes it in an almost musical crescendo of style. This is a movie that runs on the Rule of Cool, supported secondarily by Rule of Funny, and only occasionally by any sort of causality or emotional interaction. But director Kim Jee-woon is very clear about the ride he wants to take you on from the very start. There’s a classic train robbery with a virtuosic tracking shot, of course. But the three Korean outlaws drawn into it from different sides, the Good (Park Do-won), the Bad (Park Chang-yi), and the Weird (Yoon Tae-goo), have wildly different aesthetics and styles. The movie supports a character who is more of a straight-up cowboy, a character who is more of a straight-up a gangster in a suit, and a character who is… wearing goggles, I guess. But it’s a hodgepodge. One senses the movie is meant to be as fun as being able to pick out all your favorite desserts from the buffet.     Or, perhaps, ‘kid in a candy shop’ is a better metaphor, because that seems like it’s the amount of fun that the filmmakers had making ‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird.’ The color choices, the layering of any props or costumes from anywhere remotely near to the movie’s time and place, the relentless action, the even-more relentless soundtrack full of bangers, the dolly zooms… the camera on ‘The Good, The Bad, The Weird’ is in love with movement the way a bird is in love with flying. It has to do it. And magically, even in riffing off hundreds of different Western tropes and Hollywood reference points, the movie becomes wholly its own thing. ‘The Good, The Bad, The Weird’ provides A New Hope™ for Westerns in the 21st Century, just by being itself. —SS 

89. ‘Black Rodeo’ (dir. Jeff Kanew, 1972)

A documentary departure from director Jeff Kanew’s later mainstream comedy work, ‘Black Rodeo’ captured a rodeo Harlem event with African American cowboys, in what would’ve felt like a unique cultural context. A director perhaps best known for the 1984 comedy ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ and ‘Troop Beverly Hills’ (1989), Kanew effectively cut his teeth with ‘Black Rodeo,’ his first feature, which stood out in the landscape of Western films by shining a light on African American cowboys and cowgirls via a vibrant, observational documentary lens.

It remains a culturally significant work with appearances by icons like Muhammad Ali and Woody Strode, the latter providing depth and historical context. Strode’s insights as a Western legend himself, coupled with a mixture of live rodeo footage and interviews, made ‘Black Rodeo’ a celebration of Black heritage within the traditionally white cowboy narrative. 

As with other titles on this list, the backdrop of the film’s release is crucial for contextualizing ‘Black Rodeo.’ Released in 1972, the film emerged during a period of major social and cultural shifts in the USA, particularly civil rights and the increasing acceptance of the diversity of African American culture in mainstream media. 

This was the early 1970s which saw the rise of Blaxploitation films. ‘Black Rodeo’ stood out with a different kind of vision of the African American experience, albeit one that, like many Blaxploitation movies, was not directed by a Black filmmaker. Still, even with a certain lack of documentary finesse, it contributed to a broader understanding and appreciation of African American contributions to broader American culture. —TO

88. ‘Two Mules for Sister Sara’ (dir. Don Siegel, 1970)

By the time Clint Eastwood starred in ‘Two Mules,’ he had already firmly embedded himself in the Western cinema canon. His iconic roles and contributions to the genre began with the TV series ‘Rawhide’ and culminated in Sergio Leone’s iconic Spaghetti Western ‘Dollars Trilogy,’ which Eastwood had just wrapped up a few years earlier. ‘Two Mules’ was his third post-‘Dollars Trilogy’ American Western following ‘Hang ‘Em High’ (1968) and the musical ‘Paint Your Wagon’ (1969) with Lee Marvin.

And while Eastwood didn’t direct ‘Two Mules,’ the 1970s marked the beginning of his career as a director, stepping behind the camera for several more Westerns to come including ‘High Plains Drifter’ (1973), ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ (1976), ‘Pale Rider’ (1985), and much later, the Oscar-winning ‘Unforgiven’ (1992).

‘Two Mules’ stars Eastwood as a graying mercenary and Shirley MacLaine as a woman posing as a nun, forming an unlikely partnership. A blend of Western elements with humor and even romantic comedy, it’s a mix that sharply contrasts with Eastwood’s earlier darker Westerns, particularly the more stylistically innovative approaches in Leone’s epics, with characters drenched in moral ambiguities.

Against the backdrop of the French intervention in Mexico in the mid 1800s, as the interplay between Eastwood and MacLaine in ‘Two Mules’ unfolds, secrets are revealed that complicate their relationship and, as a result, the story. His pragmatic and cynical nature clashes with her mysterious and performative pious front.

Siegel’s direction strikes a balance between light-hearted moments and serious action sequences. And it works. —TO

87. ”49-’17’ (dir. Ruth Ann Baldwin, 1917)

The first Western directed by a woman, Ruth Ann Baldwin’s hilariously complex ”49–’17’ is a meta twist on the already popular genre. Filmed for Universal, where Baldwin was one of several women directors employed there at the time, this parody Western stars her husband, actor Leo O. Pierson, as an Eastern city slicker hired by his boss, Judge Brand (Joseph W. Girard), to recreate Nugget Notch, the Western town where he and his partner struck it rich during the Gold Rush. Once Brand arrives at the newly re-built town, populated by hired actors with shady pasts, Baldwin’s film enacts, with a winking grin, every cliché of the genre. Through the use of actors playing actors who are actually ‘real’ Westerners, Baldwin calls into focus that the very nature of the Western film genre is itself mostly just grown men from the East playing at being rough and tumble cowboys and outlaws. —MG

86. ‘Blood on the Moon’ (dir. Robert Wise, 1948)

Robert Mitchum, already the consummate performer of American antiheroes just six years into his screen career, plays a morally ambiguous gunslinger in Robert Wise’s taut and shadow-cloaked ‘Blood on the Moon.’ Wise, then an established filmmaker of genre projects from ‘The Body Snatcher’ to ‘Born to Kill,’ transposes the urban claustrophobia of noir to the vastness of the Southwest, where corruption and rot fester in wide open spaces.

Mitchum plays Jim Garry, a drifting cowman roped into a dispute between cattle herders, homesteaders, and the Native Americans with which they share the land. Robert Preston (15 years before starring in the Warner Bros. musical ‘The Music Man’) co-stars as Tate Riling, a longtime friend who entreats Garry into the conflict — only to reveal a criminal plot of his own to trick another local rancher out of his money. Based on a Luke Short novel, ‘Blood on the Moon’ lulls you with its seemingly ambling place before erupting into tense action. B-horror movie cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca is a fascinating match to the material, often shrouding it in such darkness that it’s hard to surmise where we are in space and time. But where we are is firmly in noir country, despite the cowboy trappings surrounding it, and with a sturdy performance from silent-type Mitchum, an outlaw who’s not here to save the day. —RL

85. ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (dir. George Roy Hill, 1969)

The most onscreen magical moments in Hollywood history aren’t easily explained or reverse-engineered — sometimes you just catch lightning in a bottle and ride it out to cinematic immortality. That was certainly the case with ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ a film that paired Robert Redford and Paul Newman, electrified the zeitgeist, and created perhaps the most iconic onscreen duo in the history of the Western genre.

George Roy Hill’s film lives and dies by the chemistry of its two leads. As Hole-in-the-Wall gang leader Butch Cassidy, Newman exhibits the same smooth-talking cockiness that powered films like ‘Cool Hand Luke’ and ‘The Sting,’ while Redford gives a brilliant performance as the Sundance Kid, a soft spoken marksman who never misses a shot. William Goldman’s script is filled with brilliantly quippy dialogue for the two men to feast on, and cinematic touches like Burt Bacharach’s original song ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ soften the rough edges of the genre on the way to turning ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ into one of the most approachable Westerns ever made. It’s such a treat to revisit the onscreen friendship between Newman and Redford that it’s easy to forget that the film ends in tragedy. But those final freeze frames are a perfect metaphor for how firmly Newman and Redford’s cowboys would insert themselves into the fabric of American pop culture. —CZ

84. ‘Posse’ (dir. Mario Van Peebles, 1993)

‘Posse’ was a breath of fresh air when it was released in 1993. It combined traditional Western elements with a vivid portrayal of African American soldiers and outlaws in a post-Civil War setting, something that hadn’t been much explored in mainstream American cinema. Directed by Mario Van Peebles, who also starred in the film, ‘Posse’ was distinguished by the assertive way Peebles effectively reclaimed the Western arena for stories about Black heroes and the communities from which they emerged. 

The backdrop of its release is also key. The early 1990s were a great moment for Black Cinema, what some key voices like Roger Ebert referred to as a renaissance period. Van Peebles was a leading personality in the movement, particularly following the success of his ‘New Jack City’ two years prior. 

As a result, ‘Posse’ was arguably more than just a film about a group of Black soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War battling outlaws and racialized violence. It was part of a broader cultural moment that saw African American filmmakers gaining new ground in Hollywood, telling stories that had long been neglected or handled by non-Black filmmakers. 

Van Peebles’ focus on Black cowboys and soldiers challenged traditional narratives of the Western, which typically marginalized or excluded their experiences despite their historical presence in the American West. This was a time when the industry was more receptive to diverse voices, and the film, however unintentionally, contributed to a rethinking of genre conventions and a more inclusive depiction of American history on the big screen. —TO

83. ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (dir. Sergio Leone, 1964)

Where would the Western be without ‘A Fistful of Dollars’? This was the film that ignited the Spaghetti Western movement, that gave us Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood as a superstar, and Ennio Morricone, and that helped rewrite the film history books on the genre. ‘Fistful’ is the first of the ‘Dollars Trilogy,’ or the adventures of the Man With No Name (technically he’s referred to here as ‘Joe’). And though Leone may have made an unauthorized ripoff of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movie ‘Yojimbo,’ Leone makes it all his own. The dramatic, operatic close-ups of Clint’s eyes, the slow-building, endless stare downs, the piccolo trills on Morricone’s score, they’re all attributes filmmakers would try and copy for decades. But the cool factor of hearing Eastwood say ‘get three coffins ready’ and whipping back his poncho can’t be matched. —BW

82. ‘Tumbleweeds’ (dir. King Baggot, 1925)

At the height of the silent era, Hollywood had two major Western stars: Tom Mix and William S. Hart. While Mix was known for his flashy costumes and action prowess, Hart, who was both a trained Shakespearean actor and friends with legendary Old West lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, brought an understated honor and integrity to his western heroes. His final film, ‘Tumbleweeds’ centers on cattlemen dealing with the influx of settlers during the Oklahoma Territory’s 1889 land rush. The film perfectly distills the ethos of the white men who ‘founded’ the American West. For them, it was land for the taking (native inhabitants be damned!), and when regulations changed to encourage more settlers, the betrayal and distrust of the government that took root then has yet to be fully shaken even now. All of the complexities and myths and lies — and beauty — of the American West are on full display here. —MG

81. ‘The Learning Tree’ (dir. Gordon Parks, 1969)

Directed by Gordon Parks, ‘The Learning Tree’ was one of the first major films directed by an African American that was backed by a major studio. A pioneering work based on Parks’ semi-autobiographical novel, the film is set in 1920s Kansas and follows the life of Newt Winger, a young Black man contending with the complexities of growing up amid pervasive racial prejudice. In a key moment, Newt witnesses a crime, and the handling of this crime by the community and the justice system becomes a vehicle for examining the hate and prejudice within. 

Injustice, personal growth, the importance of community, and resilience are on the menu and Parks, a seasoned photographer, captures his mixed community of characters against the imposing plains of Kansas, with an unflinching eye. 

Yet, ‘The Learning Tree’ is also a personal statement. His direction gives the film an intimate and reflective quality. It not only tells a story of harsh realities faced but also celebrates the moments of joy and of course learning that shapes Newt’s journey to adulthood. 

In many ways it was the forerunner of future successful rural America-set African American family films, from ‘Sounder’ (1972) to ‘Down in the Delta’ (1995). —TO

80. ‘The Covered Wagon’ (dir. James Cruze, 1923)

The second highest-grossing film of 1923, ‘The Covered Wagon’ was so popular that President Warren G. Harding held a special screening of it at the White House. According to Jesse Lasky Jr., son of Paramount Pictures founder Jesse Lasky, the goal of director James Cruze was to ‘elevate the Western, which had always been sort of a potboiler kind of film, to the status of an epic.’ To achieve this, Cruze not only employed one of the largest casts, which include extras from the Northern Arapaho Nation, and crews assembled at the time, he also filmed mostly on location, utilizing the deserts of Palm Springs, Nevada, and Utah. There’s even footage of the Antelope Island Bison Herd, who make their home near the Great Salt Lake. The wagons themselves were borrowed from the families of real pioneers, many of whom served as the film’s wagon train extras. —MG

79. ‘The Settlers’ (dir. Felipe Gálvez, 2023)

Set in 1901 in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, this South American Western, which debuted at Cannes 2023 before playing the festival circuit, is gorgeously shot by rookie director Felipe Gálvez and cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo, with a powerful dissonant score by Harry Allouche. But the rugged landscape reveals harsh colonial violence against the Indigenous population. The two-part narrative starts as rapacious Spanish entrepreneur José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) hires three horsemen to clear a passage to the sea for his sheep herds, with orders to wipe out anyone who stands in his way. Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) is a marksman of Spanish and Indigenous descent; he works for Scottish ex-soldier Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), while the third man is Apache-hunter mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall). The three men do not trust each other and soon fall into back-biting and fighting as they mow down their human prey. The second part, some years later, shows Segundo settled with a family, as government representatives seek to learn the truth of the earlier massacres. ‘The Settlers’ is a powerful western noir with disturbing parallels to North America’s own destructive history. —AT

78. ‘Dances with Wolves’ (dir. Kevin Costner, 1990)

The Western had been pronounced dead by virtually everyone when actor, producer, and director Kevin Costner brought it roaring back to life with this 1990 hit, a great American epic that triumphed against industry expectations to win seven Oscars including Best Picture. While the film was not revolutionary in the way some less informed commentators believed (there had been Westerns going back to the silent era that were sympathetic to Native American characters — this was hardly the first), it was an exquisite piece of classical craftsmanship — elegant and expressive in its visuals, rousing and affecting in its characterizations and musical score, and sweeping in its ambition. As with much of Costner’s work, its earnest sincerity is both its greatest strength and the thing that makes it an easy target for cynics; Costner wears his heart on his sleeve, and the emotional purity of his vision makes ‘Dances with Wolves’ a deeply moving piece of old-fashioned Hollywood mythmaking. —JH

77. ‘Harlem on the Prairie’ (dir. Sam Newfield, 1937)

‘Harlem on the Prairie’ broke ground as an all-Black Western. Released during the Great Depression’s tail end, it defied Hollywood’s racial norms during a period steeped in racial segregation, a bold move that challenged the genre’s tradition of white heroes, placing a Black cowboy (Herb Jeffries) at the fore.   

The all-Black cast is certainly the most significant aspect of the film in the context of Westerns, but Jeffries’ character still embodies the classic Western hero’s spirit, albeit with a fresh cultural perspective. This charming cowboy who fights outlaws and helps a young woman search for her father’s lost gold contrasted with the crude characterizations of Black characters in 1930s mainstream American movies. And seemingly simple, classic Western acts performed by a Black man is what redefines the hero in a way that resonated with Black audiences.

It’s worth pointing out that Jeffries’ mixed heritage — born to a father of Sicilian descent and a mother who was of Irish and African-American descent — allowed him some freedom to shapeshift during a deeply racialized Hollywood era, playing various ethnicities, including non-Black characters. To be sure, he identified as Black, and films like ‘Harlem on the Prairie,’ where he deliberately positioned himself as a Black leading man, were important during a time when racial definitions were very rigid in America. Jeffries purposefully sought opportunities to positively represent Black people, particularly in Westerns where they were rare.

Ultimately, the film, which bridged the gap between traditional Westerns and elements of the musical, primarily makes a statement through its existence rather than anything explicitly radical in its form. It’s an early example of breaking cinematic color barriers, even though it wasn’t much interested in making commentary on the social conditions of the time. —TO

76. ‘The Iron Horse’ (dir. John Ford, 1924)

The first major success for director John Ford, ‘The Iron Horse’ centers on the construction of America’s first transcontinental railroad, culminating in the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit. The sweeping spectacle was Fox’s answer to Paramount’s popular epic from the year before, ‘The Covered Wagon.’ Filmed largely on location, it features the stunning, painterly use of landscape that would come to define Ford’s directing career. George O’Brien stars as Davy Brandon, a Pony Express rider whose railroad surveyor father was killed a decade earlier. Although the film features roughly 300 extras from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Reservation its depiction of its native characters, like many films within the genre, oscillates between showing them as average people trying to survive a changing world and as ruthless, violent murderers. The reveal that its primary villain is actually a shady white businessman masquerading as a renegade Cheyenne, foresees the kind of subversion of tropes more commonly found in revisionist westerns. —MG

75. ‘Westward the Women’ (dir. William Wellman, 1951)

A movie so good that it almost lives up to its incredible premise, William A. Wellman’s ‘Westward the Women’ tells the plausible enough, not-at-all true story of an old California landowner named Roy Whitman (John McIntire) who realizes that his precious valley — a painstakingly tamed pocket of the American frontier — won’t have a future unless his farm hands can start families there. The solution is obvious: Roy, along with his smoldering misogynist of a wagon master (Robert Taylor as Buck Wyatt), will travel to Chicago, where they’ll recruit 140 ‘good women’ (a motley crew of widows, immigrants, and prospectless bachelorettes) to accompany them back home. But that journey proves to be every bit as perilous as Buck threatens it will when he warns that only a third of the women will live to see Whitman’s Valley, as the brides-to-be soon face a slew of dangers, some of which come from within their own wagon train.

Significantly more brutal than you’d ever expect from a rootin’-tootin’ road movie whose story is credited to Frank Capra (the wagon train is witness to rapes, executions, and accidental child slayings within just a few days of leaving Chicago), ‘Westward the Women’ is sustained by the friction it creates between the hokeyness of its stereotypical characters and the mercilessness of their unsparing circumstances. Yes, modern viewers might blanche at the short Japanese cook who’s used for comic relief (Henry Nakamura) and roll their eyes at the slap-happy romance that develops between Buck and a showgirl named Fifi (Denise Darcel, who helps to disprove the wagon master’s belief that women are basically just cattle but scarier). But Wellman mines a raw and enduring thrill from watching social prejudices succumb to the base realities of life on the trail, which exposes people for what they really are, and in turn reveals the hidden strengths that made America so powerful. —DE

74. ‘The Proposition’ (dir. John Hillcoat, 2005)

Australia might not always be the expected setting for a Western, but it is always the Most setting for a Western. Director John Hillcoat’s coverage of the Outback, far more than the monoliths of Monument Valley, is The Landscape; it’s simultaneously an expression of alien beauty and a reminder that one day the sun is going to explode. It admits no human life. The atmosphere is hellish, there is a palpable fear of it, but you cannot dismiss it. There is some barbarous truth here — although probably not for the damned souls who choose to try and colonize it.     On its face, ‘The Proposition’ is a story about three criminal brothers. The middle one (Guy Pearce) is captured by a lawman (Ray Winstone) clinging to his duty with the whitest of white knuckles and proposes a deal to his captive: If he finds and kills his older brother (Danny Huston), then he and his also-captured younger brother (Richard Wilson) will not be executed. That should give you an idea for how bleak and grubby the film is. What these characters will do in order to not die quickly stops being subtextual motivation and starts being the suspense that powers the movie. And it is a much more interesting question, honestly, when everyone is a little bit mad, and a little bit doomed, and desperate not to die. Hillcoat’s imagery blends terror and murder with beauty and power and becomes something that feels ever bigger than the Outback itself. ‘The Proposition’ is a nasty Western, but the film argues pretty persuasively that so is the nature of the West itself. —SS

73. ‘Hell’s Heroes’ (dir. William Wyler, 1929)

Made at the tail end of the silent era — and later re-released with synced sound — ‘Hell’s Heroes,’ William Wyler’s impressionistic take on Peter B. Kyne’s oft-filmed ‘The Three Godfathers,’ is perhaps the acclaimed director’s most spiritual film. Rife with allegorical Christian imagery and filmed under the blazing Mojave sun, the film centers on three bad men (Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler) who rob the bank of New Jerusalem a few days before Christmas, then light out for the desert, followed by a posse hellbent on bringing them to justice. Lost and delirious for lack of water, the trio come across a newborn babe and a dying woman — the wife of the cashier they just murdered — sheltering in a stranded wagon. The outlaws must then sacrifice their riches — and their lives — in order to bring the child back to safety, and in the process they may just redeem their very souls. —MG

72. ‘Lone Star’ (dir. John Sayles, 1996)

‘Lone Star’ is a modern Western that weaves mystery and drama within the setting of a small Texas border town. Spanning multiple generations, past and present are interlaced to unravel the complex relationships of the townspeople. It’s a canvas upon which identity, legacy, and racial harmony are explored in Sayles’ fashion, driven more by character development and a nuanced handling of social issues than conventional Western genre action.

Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) uncovers a long-buried skeleton that leads him to investigate the mysterious past of his father, the respected former sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). The film uses the investigation as a catalyst to examine the intertwining destinies of its characters. Naturally, secrets are revealed that shape the dynamics of the community.

A Sayles storytelling trademark, ‘Lone Star’s’ mosaic-like structure and 135-minute runtime allow character arcs to unfold naturally and interconnect seamlessly. 

He insists on realistic portrayals of human struggles, creating a panorama that tackles heavy themes like segregation, heritage, and the search for belonging, minus purely Western conventions, with keen commentary.

Ultimately, this ‘redefinition’ of the Western is where its impact lies. —TO

71. ‘True Grit’ (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2010)

The Coen brothers went to Charles Portis’ 1968 novel for this Western, which they describe as a ‘beautiful young adult adventure story,’ a far cry from the 1969 John Wayne version. Critics gave the Coens high marks, and the movie proved a surprise Christmas hit ($252 million worldwide). Its success relies on Hailee Steinfeld (cast over 15,000 applicants), as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl mourning her dead father, who hires U.S. Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn (a delightful comic turn from Jeff Bridges) to find her father’s murderer. They confront a motley crew of characters along the way played by Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Barry Pepper, among others, who all have fun with Portis’ flowery 19th-century argot. The action comedy earned 10 Oscar nominations, won none. —AT

70. ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1974)

It’s hard not to be sucked into Peckinpah’s stark, gritty, intense exploration of human desperation and moral decay, set against the harshness of rural Mexico in the early 1970s. It’s a film that diverges from conventional Westerns in its depiction of the disintegration of personal ethics, embodied by its protagonist, Bennie, played by Warren Oates.

Although the setting is no mere backdrop. It acts as a mirror of Bennie’s inner turmoil, on his quest to retrieve the head of Alfredo Garcia for a major bounty. 

Peckinpah’s methodical coverage of the physical barrenness of the landscape captures Bennie’s isolation and the desperation he faces. The chosen time period — an era of social and political unrest and the evolution of a raw and realistic filmmaking aesthetic — compared to the idealized landscapes of classic Westerns, added a layer of authenticity.

And like other films of the period, the violence in ‘Alfredo Garcia’ is brutal and consequential. Bennie’s hunt for the head becomes a descent into madness. Greed warps his humanity, as seen in his bizarre conversations with the severed head.

Basically, it’s bleak with a pervasive sense of doom that hangs over its characters. It’s human frailty laid bare. —TO

69. ‘The Ruthless Four’ (dir. Giorgio Capitani, 1968)

With a title that clearly inspired a certain Tarantino film, you’d expect Giorgio Capitani’s Spaghetti Western to be a showcase for Mexican standoffs among tick-riddled characters as prone to firing verbal barbs as bullets. And you’d be right.     Gilbert Roland, built like a boxer even in his early 60s (and always great to see in Westerns as someone who grew up in a town taken over by Pancho Villa), is so jittery he can barely stop shaking to take the quinine pills needed for his malaria. Then there’s Klaus Kinski as a milk-drinking vagabond posing as a minister (and forgetting he’s supposed to be playing the part even when people call him ‘reverend’). George Hilton as Kinski’s vainglorious toady. And Van Heflin as the kind of grizzled sap he always played. Heflin is a gold prospector who needs help mining his claim and whose choice of helper (Hilton) quickly ropes in an unwanted Roland and Kinski. (The passive-aggressive ‘three pairs of hands are better than two’ soon becomes ‘four pairs of hands are better than three.’) The result is more of a gunfighters’ ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ told with pulp verve and melodramatic whip zooms. Four there may be, but you know only one will be standing in the end. —CB   

68. ‘The Phantom Empire’ (dir. Otto Brower, B. Reeves Eason, 1935)

The great utility of the Western genre has been the set of symbols it provides. Through the idea of the cowboy, the railroad man, the hired gun, and more, we can collectively imagine the country we want America to be. Do we want the forces of capitalism and exploitation to run roughshod over the land? Or do we want Queen Tika of the Muranians, sitting on her wells of radium in her technologically-advanced kingdom hidden deep under the ground, to control everything? ‘The Phantom Empire’ is a 12-part serial from 1935 that rocketed ‘Singing Cowboy’ Gene Autry into the zeitgeist and is widely hailed as the first Sci-Fi Western. With its combination of adventure hooks, kids being menaces (in a good way), fun-spirited fights, kidnappings, and so many chase sequences, it’s not hard to draw an evolutionary line from ‘The Phantom Empire’ to things like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Outer Range’ — as well as, of course, ‘Nope.’     But ‘The Phantom Empire’ is interesting in its own right, not just for its place in film history. The story feels straight-up made up, almost on the spot, in an infectiously fun way. The costumes are big and loud and maybe made out of kitchen pots. The Gene Autry songs? Well, they’re in there too. ‘The Phantom Empire’ brims with a radioactive energy that folds the audience into the story’s sense of play. Few feature films, of any era or any genre, feel as creative as this silly serialized story about a queen with wireless telephones (!) and a cowboy who runs a ranch with a radio show. —SS 

67. ‘Nope’ (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)

As ‘Nope’ informs its 21st century audience early on, one of the first moving images in history was a reel of a Black man riding upon a majestic stallion. And yet, film depictions of Black cowboys are scarce at best, despite the many historic examples to pull from. Jordon Peele’s science-fiction film may not be a Western in the traditional sense, but it does subtly correct the discrepancy it points out by making a modern cowboy out of Daniel Kaluuya’s taciturn protagonist OJ. The quiet son of a rancher and horse trainer, OJ grows, via a hair-brained scheme to capture footage of a mysterious UFO haunting the Agua Dulce valley, from a depressive to an action hero.  

Peele’s film is constantly concerned with the queasy nature and morality of spectacle, and it extends its ambivalence to the Western, populating its story with cowboy-themed amusement parks and a high-brimmed hat-clad Steven Yeun as a child star looking to recapture his former glory by making an attraction out of the flesh-eating UFO. Still, Peele seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, poking at how the genre makes entertainment out of crime and conflict while embracing its eternal appeal. When Kaluuya rides through the desert dust on his horse in ‘Nope’s’ closing scenes, the director can’t resist a money shot that takes the audience’s breath away. —WC   

66. ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Kelly Reichardt makes movies so small and specific that they feel like memories from your own life. It’s a style that feels unconducive to the transportive, epic sweep that the Western is associated with, but her contribution to the genre, ‘Meek’s Cutoff,’ bends those conventions to her unique vision. Presenting the audience with a mere sliver of a settler group’s journey along the Oregon Trail, ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ intimately details the rising tensions on the caravan, as the men turn on Bruce Greenwood’s untrustworthy guide and the wives (represented by a remarkably unsentimental and stern Michelle Williams) grow frustrated at their inability to take control of the situation. Loosely based on a real historical incident, ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ captures the tension and fear of the unknown that defined the West for those who settled there. Few other films have made the frontier feel more real, at one beautiful and ordinary. —WC 

65. ‘Companeros!’ (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1970)

Fernando Rey as a turtle-collecting college professor who’s inspired his own militia movement in the Mexican Revolution. Franco Nero as a spats-wearing Swedish dandy/arms dealer. And of course, Jack Palance as a one-handed, weed-smoking fiend whose best friend is a hawk named Marsha. Right there, that’s a recipe for an all-time classic Spaghetti Western. Add in one of the MVPs of the genre, Tomas Milian, as a revolutionary, and you’ve got a character piece for the ages.     Technically, ‘Companeros!’ is a Zapata Western — a subgenre of a subgenre — which means, like a whole strain of Italian-produced Westerns, it’s specifically about the Mexican Revolution. In practice, it’s really a buddy comedy, as unlikely friends-in-the-making Nero and Milian pair their own unique skillsets through a succession of increasingly elaborate action sequences. Corbucci’s lighter riff on his own ‘The Mercenary’ is sometimes dismissed for being overly comedic, even though his approach to action had clearly become that much more sophisticated. But why so serious? If you don’t appreciate one particular jump cut sight gag featuring Marsha the Hawk, you probably could use some of what Palance is smoking. —CB 

64. ‘Buck and the Preacher’ (Sidney Poitier, 1972)

Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut is one of the most flat-out entertaining Westerns ever made, largely thanks to the hilarious camaraderie between Poitier (as a taciturn wagon master) and Harry Belafonte (as a wild con man) as they team up to protect a wagon train of Black settlers from the white bounty hunters out to terrorize them. Belafonte in particular is revelatory in his comic characterization — he’s gleefully off-putting here, a far cry from the suave leading man roles that he was known for. Poitier and Belafonte make this one of the first great buddy films, but it’s so much more; there’s as much rage here as there is humor, and as much sadness as rage — which is saying a lot. A corrective to decades in which Black characters were underrepresented in Western movies and a history lesson about race relations in post-Civil War America, ‘Buck and the Preacher’ is long on serious intent yet never feels weighted down by it; it accomplishes its mission within a spectacularly entertaining action-comedy framework. Jazz great Benny Carter provides a score that adds to the buoyancy, and the supporting cast is deep and rich, with one of the all-time great bad guys in Cameron Mitchell. Few movies are so good at being simultaneously so much fun and so ground-breaking. —JH   

63. ‘Rodeo’ (dir. Carroll Ballard, 1969)

A nose. An eye. An ear. A horn. The bull assembles itself in your mind as Carroll Ballard shows you its constituent parts in extreme close-up. In fact, most of his 20-minute short film showing the 1968 National Radio in Oklahoma City is built around tight close-ups, especially of legendary bull rider Larry Mahan. Without sync sound, this experimental film is an epic of the miniature. One moment, Ballard and his camera operators (among them, Caleb Deschanel) will linger on Mahan’s hand slipping in for an underhand grip of the rein, and the next, the bull starts out of the gate. But there’s no frantic explosion of kineticism: Mahan’s ride is in slow motion, all ambient sound absent, with just a single, solitary violin for accompaniment. This is more Bruce Conner than John Ford, but ‘Rodeo’ is still the essence of the Western: It’s about the interplay of humans and animals, where civilization meets nature, and flesh meets its match in will. The Western shows its elasticity here, capable of accommodating visions of classicism, modernism, and even the non-narrative avant-garde. —CB 

62. ‘Bend of the River’ (dir. Anthony Mann, 1952)

One of the great shifts in movie history is the move from pre-war trustworthy, people-friendly Jimmy Stewart to post-war James Stewart. This craggier and sadder Stewart not only gave some of his best performances for Alfred Hitchcock (‘Rear Window,’ ‘Vertigo’) but carried a series of five Anthony Mann Westerns of which the second, ‘Bend of the River’ contends for the best. (OK, reviews weren’t great when it opened, but its reputation has improved over time. The first Mann-Stewart collaboration, 1950’s ‘Winchester ’73,’ is damned good. They all are.) In these Mann character studies we find less Western myth-building, more unsettling violence. Mann’s Stewart isn’t asking you to like him. He’s asking you to wonder want he might be capable of doing under enough duress. The old Western honor codes do not apply here. These movies, featuring Stewart wearing the same hat and riding the same horse, Pie, proved to be hugely popular.

In this, Mann’s first color film, Stewart’s character is beaten and abandoned by his so-called friend (Arthur Kennedy) and wanders the lush Oregon mountains as he seeks revenge. Mann figured out how to unleash Stewart’s inner rage. Still to come: ‘The Naked Spur,’ ‘The Far Country,’ and ‘The Man from Laramie,’ their last movie together. —AT

61. ‘Sergeant Rutledge’ (dir. John Ford, 1960)

Ford’s ‘Sergeant Rutledge’ is a compelling addition to the Western canon, groundbreaking in its exploration of race and justice through the lens of a Black cavalry officer, Braxton Rutledge, played by all-time Western stud Woody Strode. Like several of the films on this list, the historical and social backdrop is crucial in understanding and appreciating it. Ford uses this post-Civil War era setting not just to tell a story of individual heroism but to critique the racial injustices that were still prevalent at the time of the film’s release, and, frustratingly, still are, more than six decades later: Collectively, racial bias in the American judicial system.

A Black cavalry sergeant in the post-Civil War era is falsely accused of rape and murder of a white girl and the murder of the girl’s father, in a film that combines elements of a courtroom drama with a traditional Western, centering Rutledge’s trial where he faces racial prejudice and must prove his innocence in a system clearly stacked against him. 

As the story unfolds, Rutledge is steadfast in maintaining his dignity. And it’s Ford’s portrayal of a dignified Black male protagonist that subverted typical racial stereotypes, unlike many films of its time. 

A role that seemed tailormade for Strode (the story is that the studio wanted Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte), Rutledge is not submissive or villainous, but instead is a figure of strength, integrity, and heroism.

Courtroom dramas where race plays a central role are aplenty in the history of American cinema, often reflections of their eras. In the context of ‘Sergeant Rutledge,’ its distinctiveness lies in the film’s head-on confrontations of racial prejudice not commonly addressed in its era and genre. —TO

60. ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1970)

For Sam Peckinpah to follow ‘The Wild Bunch’ with this raffish Western comedy would be like if Stanley Kubrick followed ‘2001’ with ‘Men in Black.’ Despite its limited violence, this is consistent with much of the director’s films in its interest in oddball characters, led by the long-time struggling prospector whose fortunes improve after he discovers water on his property. It features a brilliant (and rare lead) performance by Jason Robards, Jr., 180 degrees away from the usual well-groomed professionals he usually played, with the never-better Stella Stevens, as a local prostitute kicked out of town he befriends, and David Warner as a minister of a church he invented, as his cohorts in adventure.

Like ‘The Wild Bunch’ and many Westerns of its time, ‘Cable Hogue’ is set at a time when the west is seeing modern ways begin to encroach, and its characters confront that their time might be passing (perhaps parallel to Peckinpah’s own sense of his position).

Along with its many charms, it features a supporting cast of character actors such as Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, Gene Evans, Slim Pickens, Kathleen Freeman, and others most in the final stages of their careers, all celebrating an individualistic and idiosyncratic way of life and movies that was coming to an end. —TB

59. ‘The Man from Laramie’ (dir. Anthony Mann, 1955)

When you think of James Stewart, you don’t necessarily think of him first and foremost as a Western star, so thoroughly has his efforts in the genre been overshadowed by ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ or his masterful psychological turn in ‘Vertigo.’ But his contributions to the genre are vast, and they include five films he made with director Anthony Mann. ‘The Man from Laramie’ stars Stewart as a vigilante who arrives in the Western town of Coronado looking for the man responsible for his brother’s death. His suspects are all men who work and live on the ranch of cattle baron Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp), and his presence is the powder keg needed to kick off a violent power struggle for control over the ranch. Shot in vivid technicolor and in widescreen CinemaScope, ‘The Man From Laramie’ looks gigantic, which is only appropriate for a Shakespearean revenge story of such sweeping scale. Despite Stewart’s innate likability and pathos, lurking underneath the film’s conventional premise and cheery opening theme song is a black-hearted and morally queasy psychological fable. —WC

58. ‘Django’ (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

For a sensation to truly become a phenomenon, there must always be two. Having Clint Eastwood and his Dollars Trilogy wasn’t enough for the Spaghetti Western to become a truly global phenomenon with a grammar and affect all its own. It needed ‘Django.’ It needed Franco Nero in a Union officer’s cape dragging a coffin behind him. Even heavily dubbed in the English-language version, Nero’s Django represents one of the most charismatic breakout performances in movie history. In fact, has there ever been a more handsome man onscreen than Nero?     Not idly is that question asked. There’s a line of thought that the vivid yellow of the wheatfield and blue of the sky in ‘Shane’ reflect young Brandon deWilde’s hair and eye color, and that he only sees his landscape in terms of himself. With ‘Django,’ how can you not see the stubble on Nero’s cheek as the mud covering everything in the town. His piercing blue eyes like the water of the lake where Django’s love Maria (Loredana Nusciak) is gunned down and he finally recognizes the depth of his feeling for her. The tufted brown of his hair like the crosses in the cemetery where he finally seizes his destiny. Nero is a pinnacle of male beauty, and set against a film that in so many other ways revels in ugliness: There’s certainly never been an uglier town in any Western, and ruled over by a racist Confederate exile, Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), whose followers wear red klansmen hoods. Salvation for these bastards can only come via what’s in Django’s coffin.     So popular that it spawned literally dozens of unofficial sequels starring other actors — and ensured the global viability of the Italian Western beyond Eastwood — it’s here where the Spaghetti Western took a more violent turn: An ear sliced off and fed to its owner, Django’s hands crushed and broken, a woman whipped by her captors. Even if Nusciak’s Maria has about the agency of a typical Bond girl of this period, like most Spaghetti Western heroines, the chemistry she has with Nero is palpable. And of course, Hollywood would call upon the film’s leading man shortly. Like Eastwood and ‘Paint Your Wagon,’ Nero would find, with ‘Camelot,’ that the logical next step of Spaghetti Western superstardom was a Lerner & Loewe roadshow musical. —CB 

57. ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

Sam Peckinpah at his most elegiac and lyrical. ‘The Wild Bunch’ is more revolutionary and ‘Ride the High Country’ a more objectively perfect film, but even in its many bastardized forms (the movie was taken out of Peckinpah’s hands and no definitive director’s cut exists) ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ packs an emotional punch few Westerns — hell, few movies period — can top. The friendship gives the movie its title (and thanks to the layered performances of James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, Peckinpah has two of his greatest characters) and the movie oscillates between tenderness, brutality, humor, and regret in a manner that leaves the viewer completely shaken by what the characters, and by allegorical extension, America itself, have lost. Add to that some of Peckinpah’s most memorably staged moments of violence (the image of Billy firing a shotgun full of dimes that explode in the air singlehandedly justifies the entire film), a typically rich supporting cast of character actors (including Peckinpah stalwarts L.Q. Jones and R.G. Armstrong), and a classic score by Bob Dylan, and you’ve got a wounded Western classic — a movie as broken and beautiful as its lead characters. —JH

56. ‘River of No Return’ (dir. Otto Preminger, 1954)

This CinemaScope Western shot on location in the Canadian Rockies opens on Robert Mitchum cutting down a tree with an axe. It falls. Then he leaves it. No timber to be collected, no mention of the cutting ever again. He rides off. Maybe Preminger felt the swing of his axe across the frame looked good in widescreen.      Or maybe it’s that clearing the land is enough. ‘River of No Return’ is about clearing a path for oneself through life. Recently released from prison, Mitchum’s character journeys to a town where his nine-year-old son has been looked after by a dance hall girl (Marilyn Monroe) while he’s in prison for killing a man. The boy barely knows his father. And of course, father and son get caught up in Marilyn’s own drama. If the Western later had a profound influence on Italian cinema, here’s a case where Italian cinema influenced the Western: ‘River of No Return’ is loosely based on ‘Bicycle Thieves,’ in that Marilyn’s corrupt boyfriend (Rory Calhoun) steals Mitchum’s horse and gun. Arthouse pretensions abound, but in Preminger’s hands, it works: The action on the river, when Monroe, Mitchum, and his son take to a raft is genuinely thrilling, and the Banff landscapes are a spectacle precisely suited to the ‘Scope format. —CB 

55. ‘Rancho Notorious’ (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Marlene Dietrich and a bunch of good time gals save some horses and ride cowboys instead. There’s allegedly other stuff that happens in ‘Rancho Notorious’ — and to be fair to director Fritz Lang, that other stuff includes a whole-ass mystery Arthur Kennedy is keen to solve around ‘HATE, MURDER, and REVENGE!’ as the film’s opening ballad intones. But this movie is by, for, and focused around Marlene Dietrich’s alter-ego, Altar Keane. She is its gravity. Everything else is secondary, and the movie is all the better for it. ‘Rancho Notorious’ is this weird, hilarious fantasyscape that has the same logic and pathos as a Road Runner cartoon — which is the only other setting this writer can think of where a secret legendary crime lair called “Chuck-a-Luck” makes any kind of sense. It would be futile to talk about what happens or the performances or the color combinations in the sets and costuming, or the musical numbers (of which there is certainly more than one). Suffice it to say that if you are looking to have a good, absurd time with a Western, you need look no further; and that is a strength of Westerns themselves that Marlene can do a takeover of this kind and it doesn’t ruin the genre — she makes the genre better. —SS  

54. ‘El Topo’ (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky dipped into the Western genre — and possibly some LSD as well — for this surreal odyssey through a nameless mystical landscape that sought to recreate, for viewers, the experience of taking psychedelic drugs. Jodorowsky himself plays the title character, a gunfighter clad in all black and on a warped hero’s journey with his six-year-old child, Hijo (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s real son).

Jodorowsky shot the film in Mexico, though its landscapes are made increasingly strange with Eastern religious symbolism and outré production design credited to the director himself. ‘El Topo’ meditates on mythic Western themes of vengeance, as the gunslinger sets out to reap retribution for a slaughter of his village, and masculinity, as Hijo is primed for rites of passage that will carry him into adulthood while inheriting the next cycle of generational violence. The film was controversial for a graphic rape scene that Jodorowsky at one point suggested was unsimulated. For all of its provocation, ‘El Topo’ is certainly one of the boldest and bizarre Westerns ever made, and among the most successful attempts of an international filmmaker to reshape American iconography with their own sensibility. —RL

53. ‘Near Dark’ (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

An inventive, stylish mixing of the blood of a slasher with the sweat of a Western, ‘Near Dark’ arrived in 1987 as a grittier alternative to teen vampire films of the era like ‘The Lost Boys’ and ‘Fright Night.’ Whereas those films place their vampiric antagonists in placidly familiar suburban landscapes, Kathryn Bigelow (in her first solo directorial effort) expands the horizons for her bloodsuckers by setting the story in the deserts and plains of the midwest, gleefully fashioning the adventures of the central nomadic vampire crew after a classic western. Maybe a bit too closely, because the romantic leads — Adrian Pasdar’s newly turned Oklahoma farm boy and Jenny Wright’s sympathetic ingenue — are frankly total drips. The real star is Bill Paxton as charming, serpent-like coven member Severan, who he plays with the swagger and sex appeal of a classic gunslinger antihero and imbues with the menace of an unforgettable horror creation. —WC    

52. ‘Forty Guns’ (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Barbara Stanwyck couldn’t give a bad performance if she tried, and even her more obscure films see her give a masterclass in playing flinty, uncompromising, and original women. ‘Forty Guns,’ Samuel Fuller’s 1957 Western, gives the femme fatale master a particularly rich part in Jessica Drummond, an uncompromising landowner who rules over a tiny Arizona town with her entourage of 40 hired men. She’s unscrupulous and unsentimental, willing to do whatever it takes to keep her hold over her territory, even as sparks fly between her and Griff (Barry Sullivan), a gunslinger looking to put one of her men behind bars. In lesser hands she could be reduced to an unsympathetic shrew, but as played by Stanwyck she’s a vivacious and unforgettable creation. In a film shot in panoramic CinemaScope to capture every inch of the sweeping landscape, Stanwyck’s performance is consistently the biggest thing onscreen. — WC   

51. ‘Day of the Outlaw’ (dir. Andre de Toth, 1959)

A winter Western! Trust André de Toth to come up with a way to keep the endless wars between ranchers and homesteaders interesting. He’s not the eyepatch-wearing director with the most Westerns to his name, but what he does in ‘Day of the Outlaw’ is worth consideration alongside his more famous counterparts. It’s set in a town gleefully named Bitters — writers who use subtext are cowards — that, in the middle of a blizzard, finds itself terrorized by Burl Ives (yes, that Burl Ives), who is clearly having the time of his life in a cavalry uniform and a cowboy hat. The stripped down photography and clever staging — you can see everything in a room except a way out — makes this town-wide hostage crisis deliciously suspenseful. There’s only a little snappy gunplay in this Western, which feels particularly clever. De Toth is much more interested in the squirrel-y, panic-y looks on people’s faces as they desperately try to work out what to do than he is the flash of a muzzle. Robert Ryan is hanging out, too, ostensibly dealing with a love triangle between him, Tina Louise, and Alan Marshal, but really there so that he can be the one who howls and rages against the blizzard. ‘Day of the Outlaw’ executes a number of tricky tonal and structural shifts, battering the tropes of the Western down like a storm. It’s a delight. —SS 

50. ‘The Rider’ (dir. Chloe Zhao, 2018)

When IndieWire reviewed Chloé Zhao’s second feature film in 2017, this writer opened with a statement that distills the insight and authenticity of ‘The Rider’: ‘You can’t fake ‘The Rider.” Zhao’s lyrical, Cannes-winning docudrama blends fact and fiction to build not just a portrait of modern American masculinity, but of one rodeo rider’s incredible journey in particular. 

Zhao’s early bent toward casting non-actors — she found her ‘Rider’ star Brady Jandreau while making her first feature ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me,’ a festival favorite set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota — adds potency to this small-scale story with major implications. She started with pain: Jandreau’s own rodeo accident, which nearly robbed him of not just his career, but his life.  

‘The Rider’ opens with Jandreau (here cast as ‘Brady Blackburn’) removing a series of tightly wound bandages, ultimately revealing the skull-spanning wound that slashes across the right side of his skull. Brady searches for meaning in his rodeo-set accident, one that seems mostly random, but unable to compete and reticent to get literally back on the horse, Brady’s life chugs along at a muted pace.   

Who is Brady Blackburn without rodeo? Who is a cowboy without his horse? These massive questions don’t just frame Zhao’s film, but the best of the genre itself. As Brady inches his way back, he returns to the very creatures that hurt him: His beloved horses. The future of Brady’s rodeo career may be a question mark for much of the film, but his affinity for animals is never in doubt, and scenes of Jandreau training and riding a variety of horses — often easing the most skittish ones, breaking them in gentle ways — beautifully illuminates why it’s so hard for him to walk away from the only world he’s ever known. —KE

49. ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (dir. John Sturges, 1960)

‘The Magnificent Seven’ wins as both a testament to the lasting appeal of the Western and the power of a well-assembled cast. An adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece ‘Seven Samurai,’ Sturges’ film takes the core concept — a desperate village hiring samurai warriors for protection — and transplants it to the American West, with gunslingers replacing sword-wielding fighters, hired to protect a small Mexican village from a band of marauding bandits.

A classic example of the ‘assemble a team’ film, it helped establish a template for how a group of diverse characters with unique skills can come together to achieve a common goal. 

In this context, it’s a group whose appeal to audiences hinged heavily on its star power. Yul Brynner leads the ensemble as a stoic gunslinger who assembles the team. He’s joined by the likes of Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Horst Buchholz, each actor bringing a unique persona playing characters with ‘particular sets of skills.’ It was, and still is, an impressive line-up, further starrified by the villainous turn of the versatile Eli Wallach as the bandit leader terrorizing the village.

Its straightforward yet compelling depiction of heroism contrasts Kurosawa’s more technically innovative and complex film, relying on more conventional Western tropes and shootouts, which effectively catered to American audiences. And it worked!

‘The Magnificent Seven’ spawned sequels, a television series, and even Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 remake starring Denzel Washington. —TO

48. ‘The Ballad of Little Jo’ (dir. Maggie Greenwald, 1993)

Maggie Greenwald’s 1993 masterpiece is one of the best Westerns from an era that had quite a few great ones, the period immediately following ‘Dances with Wolves’ and ‘Unforgiven’ that saw the American film industry returning to the genre for a few gloriously productive years. The story of a society woman who, shunned by her family after giving birth out of wedlock, rides West and reinvents herself as a man, ‘The Ballad of Little Jo’ delivers the traditional satisfactions of all those Westerns — ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Gunfighter,’ ‘Shane’ — that explore both the liberation of a life defined by rugged individualism and its limitations, but deepens and expands on the mythology. Like most Westerns, ‘The Ballad of Little Jo’ takes place in a world where maleness is glorified as a source of power and progress, a fact that Greenwald sharply interrogates via the unique perspective Little Jo’s character provides. Greenwald asks the viewer to consider and reconsider ideas many Westerns (and American films in general) take for granted by posing two simple questions: What does Little Jo gain by becoming a man, and what does she lose? The way Greenwald explores these issues makes this essential viewing for any Western enthusiast. —JH

47. ‘There Will Be Blood’ (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus may begin in 1898 and traverses the Old West California desert, but is it a Western? There are no shootouts, no stand-offs, no stagecoach chases, and evoking ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ thanks to its magnificent sweep and off-kilter Jonny Greenwood score doesn’t do it any favors in the genre department. But it is about a lone wolf, tirelessly and endlessly toiling and fighting for his principles even as he looks out at people and sees ‘nothing worth liking.’ It is a showdown between two unlikely adversaries who each aim to seek power and glory through money, fear, or faith. And above all, it is a film about America, how capitalism and wealth will bleed you dry and wipe you off the back of its bootheel. That Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview gives one of the all-time great screen performances is just the cherry on top of the milkshake that’s all been drunk up. —BW

46. ‘3:10 to Yuma’ (dir. Delmer Daves, 1957)

There’s nothing quite like a great opening title song. Bond films know this. Westerns do too, and ‘3:10 to Yuma’ may have one of the best. It’s a mournful earworm with a steady, haunting beat, like chains clanking as prisoners walk in a row, and portends the moody, trapped feeling of the film it bookends on both a sonic and lyrical level. Sung by crooner Frankie Laine, the song, like the film, is about lost chances, fleeting romances, and wanting to make good on the life you set out to lead. For stagecoach robber Ben Wade (Glenn Ford), that means staying a free man by any means necessary. For rancher Dan Evans (Van Heflin), it means providing for his family, but that’s hard to do in a drought.

Two forces put in opposition to one another, Evans is tasked with getting Wade to the town of Contention and onto a train bound for Yuma prison. Though doing so will provide Evans with the money he needs to keep his family’s land, the risk of Wade’s gang trying to intercept him or Wade himself laying a trap bring tension to an already fraught marriage between Dan and his wife Alice. Adapted from a short story by Elmore Leonard, the story harnesses a psychological tension unique for Westerns of the time, with Evans and Wade fighting nearly as much with words as they do with guns. The black-and-white cinematography also allows us to appreciate the bleakness of life in the Old West and how the lines between good and evil, fair and unfair are so crudely drawn. —HR

45. ‘The Shootist’ (dir. Don Siegel, 1976)

Most of John Wayne’s movies after ‘True Grit’ were Westerns, and most were mediocre. ‘The Shootist,’ his final film with his health declining rapidly, was a return to form and one of the most fitting fade outs of an iconic screen legend ever. He plays a gunman credited with over 30 killings, all justified he claims, who learns he is dying from cancer. Though he craves a restful end to life, his identity is soon learned in the town where he decides to settle in. Director Don Siegel (‘Dirty Harry,’ ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’) wasn’t out to make an elegiac film, but rather, though quieter than some of his films, focuses on the impact of the presence of potential violence. That is strongly conveyed as the gunman befriends and mentors the son of his widowed landlady, with a particularly poignant shootout finale. Wayne’s costars include Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, Ron Howard, and multiple familiar character acting veterans. — TB

44. ‘The Wild Bunch’ (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

‘If they move, kill ‘em.’ Revisionist Westerns preceded ‘The Wild Bunch,’ but Sam Peckinpah murdered any notion of romance and nobility among its gunmen when William Holden spits those lines. We haven’t counted, but we’d wager Peckinpah’s film has the largest body count of any Western ever made. It’s all depicted in true carnage, with hyper kinetic cross cutting and dashes of slow-motion anarchy that still hold up as masterful examples of the craft. The opening robbery shootout should be taught in film schools till the end of time. But it’s the cadre of unlikable characters, the bleak, meaningless deaths all for a ‘dollar’s worth of steel holes,’ and the crushing feeling of obsolescence that make ‘The Wild Bunch’ a true masterpiece. The heroes here are the scorpions being overwhelmed by a mass of ants, only to be set ablaze by onlookers that no longer have any use for them. —BW

43. ‘The Quick and the Dead’ (dir. Sam Raimi, 1995)

The Western is all about its landscapes. But what are landscapes if not populated by compelling, unforgettable characters? Raimi’s gal-gunslinger drama has a baker’s dozen, and all presented via an incredible structure to introduce them to us fast: A quickdraw contest. In bracket format, no less! Think ‘Enter the Dragon’ but with six-shooters in the Old West.     Among the contestants, you’ve got Keith David, Lance Henriksen (who only signs his name with an ace of spades symbol), and of course the extraordinary quartet of Leonardo DiCaprio as ‘The Kid’ (‘Woo! I’m fast!’ he declares in maybe his most purely entertaining pre-‘Titanic’ role), Russell Crowe as killer turned preacher Cort, Gene Hackman as the town’s overlord who presides over the whole contest, and a mysterious stranger known by most as just ‘The Lady,’ played by Sharon Stone. ‘The Lady’ drifts into town looking to get into the contest, and of course, like any Western hero, she has her own motivations that will only be revealed over time. Remarkably free of the ‘strong female character’ cliches male directors sometimes think are necessary with female action leads, ‘The Quick and the Dead’ has style to spare and personality by the barrel, down to an appearance from Western legend Woody Strode. —CB 

42. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (dir. Ang Lee, 2005)

Nearly two decades later, and we still don’t know how to quit ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Ang Lee’s sweeping adaptation of Annie Proulx’s devastating short story about two shepherds who fall in love in Wyoming. There had never been an explicitly gay cowboy movie until Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) came to screens, in a movie that daringly introduced straight moviegoers to male-on-male sex onscreen in surely the gayest wide release of all time up to that point in 2005.

But as much as ‘Brokeback Mountain’ broke ground, it feels as sturdy and classic as any traditional Western, here supplanting a story of the demise of the new frontier with one of how male souls are crushed by their own societally forced repression. Ennis and Jack suffer across decades for their love, their lives inevitably ruined because of it when they are finally unable to transcend the obstacles (homophobia chief among them) to achieve a perfect union. Here’s a movie that breaks your heart open and is most revolutionary for how it deconstructs the silhouette of the American cowboy, which would never be the same on screens again. —RL

41. ‘Paris, Texas’ (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)

A film about the lonesome and the lost. About brothers and sons. About vast plains, both physical and emotional. About bright lights and broken dreams and trying to put your life back together again. Or at least the lives of those you love. The ones you were responsible for tearing apart. ‘Paris, Texas’ is as much about the maintaining of myths as it is about breaking through them. Following an amnesiac found in the desert (Harry Dean Stanton) and his journey back to remembering the brother, father, and husband that he was — one who, as it turns out, was not so great — German director Wim Wenders’ ode to the beauty and mystery of the American Southwest is also a modern reinterpretation of classic Hollywood Western storytelling that evokes George Stevens’ ‘Shane’ as much as it does Wenders’ earlier ‘Road Trilogy.’ The making of the film was also an odyssey in the best of Western traditions.

Shot in only five weeks in chronological order, meaning production would have to travel back and forth between Texas and California and back again, the script for the film also wasn’t completed by the time they started. Actor, author, and playwright Sam Shepard wrote the first half based on his novel ‘Motel Chronicles,’ as well as monologues for Wenders to insert where he saw fit, then Wenders and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson broke for two weeks to figure out the second half, which Shepard contributed to by dictating monologues over the phone. The result is a stunningly vibrant and lore-worthy emotional unearthing set against the desolate beauty of dusty roads. —HR

40. ‘Hud’ (dir. Martin Ritt, 1963)

If you found any horseshoe of hope in the final minutes of Martin Ritt’s existentially anguished neo-Western ‘Hud,’ you missed the wagon entirely. Based on a book by, of course, Larry McMurtry, ‘Hud’ deconstructed the matinee idol persona of Paul Newman, here as the prodigal and spiritually empty son of a rancher, and against the Texas Panhandle backdrop of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak killing all their cattle. In this black-and-white masterpiece of disappointment and regret, Newman cuts a mean figure as the original antihero of the 1960s, earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance. Patricia Neal rightly won a Best Actress Academy Award for portraying the ranch’s housekeeper Alma, broken down by Hud’s abuse but who manages to escape. Paul Newman would reprise his place in the Western canon six years later with ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ but ‘Hud’ is the actor’s finest hour, burrowing himself into a character so unlikable that audiences would never see him the same way again. And Ritt’s despairing vision of the American West would go on to presage the bleak soul of the United States depicted throughout the New Hollywood that came later in the 1960s. —RL

39. ‘Ulzana’s Raid’ (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1972)

The 1960s and ’70s saw several Westerns that included allegories for the ongoing war in Vietnam, in some eyes including ‘The Wild Bunch,’ ‘Little Big Man,’ and ‘The Outlaw Josie Wales.’ ‘Ulzana’s Raid’ came from Robert Aldrich who, among the many genres in which he excelled (including Westerns), directed war films ‘Attack’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen.’

An early original screenplay from Scottish novelist Alan Sharp (Arthur Penn’s ‘Night Moves’ was another standout), inspired, per Sharp, by ‘The Searchers,’ and similar in its stark portrayal of the brutality of the settler versus Native American violence.

Ulzana, a Comanche warrior, escapes confinement to avenge injustices U.S. authorities have committed. This takes the form of horrific carnage against all settlers found. A veteran Army scout (Burt Lancaster), no fan of government policy but aware he might save lives, leads an inexperienced army troop on a search for Ulzana.

Aldrich is as unsentimental a director as any, perfect for this bleak but riveting story full of tension and increased moral complexity. The naivete of the troops following the scout, their increased awareness that they are disadvantaged against those fighting for their own survival on their turf, the disillusionment that undercut their mission, all paralleled the Vietnam War experience. —TB

38. ‘The Hanging Tree’ (dir. Delmer Daves, 1959)

A proto-#MeToo Western, ‘The Hanging Tree’ is a startlingly progressive look at sexual politics and exploitation in a gold mining town. Gary Cooper’s Doc Frail is a physician who tends to the miners and their families and takes in a blind young woman, Elizabeth (Maria Schell), who’s the lone survivor of a stagecoach robbery. The town gossips spread horrible rumors that he and Elizabeth are lovers, or that she’s paying him for his medical services in an illicit way, or that he’s exploiting her. None of it’s true, but it’s a form of projection that at least one of the more predatory miners uses to justify his own attempted rape of Elizabeth. That predatory miner is played by none other than Karl Malden, who’s capable of playing venality like few others in the history of cinema. He’s there when Frail first rescues Elizabeth, blind and horribly sunburned from days out in the wilderness, and the first thing Malden’s character says is that she’s ‘sure a lot of woman.’ Thankfully, Frail is as skilled with a six-shooter as he is a scalpel, because he’s gonna need to be.     If there’s any director who deserves reclamation, it’s Delmer Daves, whose handling of this story, beautifully photographed amid the rivers and wooded hillsides of Washington state, is propulsive and energizing. He weaves the critique of institutional and individual sexism (and where it aligns with mob violence) into a genuinely thrilling package that also features George C. Scott, in his feature film debut, as a grifter of a preacher who enables Malden’s predatory behavior. Heady stuff. —CB 

37. ‘The Winning of Barbara Worth’ (dir. Henry King, 1926)

Notable for offering pre-fame Gary Cooper his breakout role, Henry King’s ‘The Winning of Barbara Worth’ is an irresistible melange of breathtaking locations (California’s Imperial Valley and Nevada’s Black Rock Desert), timeless cowboy clichés, and a hopelessly swoony romance. Hungarian-born beauty Vilma Bánky stars as Barbara Worth, a young woman who was orphaned as a child after her pioneering parents perished attempting to cross the desert. Years later two men, Willard Holmes (the impossibly charming Ronald Colman), an engineer intent on diverting the Colorado River in order to irrigate the desert, and local cowboy Abe Lee (Cooper), vie for Barbara’s affections. When corporate greed leads to a man-made disaster of epic proportions (the climactic flood sequence that depicts the formation of the Salton Sea is still impressive today), both men are given the opportunity to showcase their heroism as they attempt to save that day, but only one can win the girl. —MG

36. ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ (dir. John Huston, 1948)

‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ is a classic, although not discussed as much one might think as part of the Western canon. The film incorporates elements of the genre, for sure, to explore greed and morality, but it stands apart by focusing on the psychological unraveling of its characters in what is more of a blend of adventure with a deep character study.

Set in Mexico, it follows three gold prospectors, played by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt, as they search for fortune in the Sierra Madre mountains. A tale of how greed can corrupt even the most basic of men, it’s a darker, more introspective examination of human nature, less reliant on typical Western heroics.

‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ does share several thematic elements with classic Westerns on this list, particularly Sergio Leone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ in its exploration of greed, moral ambiguity, and the corrupting power of wealth. Furthermore, both films use their settings not just as backdrops but as integral elements that shape the story and the characters’ journeys.

Most emblematic of this in ‘Sierra Madre’ is the transformation of Dobbs (Bogart), whose degeneration into obsession and even insanity is quite alarming. But overall, the interactions among the characters, against the film’s realistic depiction of the harsh environment, is a showcase for how trust can deteriorate, and how fragile human relationships can become when the possibility of wealth is introduced, all timeless themes that resonate today. —TO

35. ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (dir. John Sturges, 1955)

‘High Noon,’ whatever its other debatable merits, gets credit for the better films it inspired. Howard Hawks’ brilliant ‘Rio Bravo’ can be seen as a rebuttal to the earlier film. ‘Bad Day at Black Rock,’ similar to ‘High Noon,’ has anti-McCarthy elements in its portrayal of one man (Spencer Tracy playing a one-armed stranger arriving in a remote desert town) fighting off toxic racism and bigotry as he investigates the death of a Japanese-American. Set only a few years before its 1955 release, it is one of the great contemporary-set Westerns in terms of utilizing genre standards — stunning landscape visuals, a sense of isolation, the need for unlikely heroes, a standout group of villainous characters. Director John Sturges made 14 other Westerns, including ‘The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’ and ‘The Magnifcent Seven,’ but none captured the essence of the genre better. Absolutely standout are the Cinemascope visuals, one of the greatest early uses of the format. An unusually short (81 minutes) MGM A-level movie release and Best Picture nominee, its supporting cast included Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Dean Jagger, and Walter Brennan among the locals he confronts. —TB

34. ‘No Country for Old Men’ (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

Who would have guessed in the ‘90s that Joel and Ethan Coen would become the filmmakers responsible for keeping the Western alive in the next millennium? Although perhaps it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise: The brothers are quintessentially American filmmakers, concerned with stories about ambition, greed, and scraping by that couldn’t be produced in any other country than the US of A. Their greatest achievement in the most American genre of all, ‘No Country for Old Men,’ is as close a canonical classic as any movie less than 20 years old could hope to be, a bitter and elliptical tale of fate and self-determination.  

Faithfully adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the brothers track three hunters and hunted — Josh Brolin’s thief, Javier Bardem’s hitman, and Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff — with a curious sense of inevitability, as if their paths are already handed to them by fate. Best remembered is Javier Bardem’s haunting performance as the emotionless, stony Anton Chigurh, and his presence adds much menace to the film. But in so many respects, ‘No Country for Old Men’ is an oddly bleak and terrifying experience, filled with stretches of silence and elliptical edits that make what could be an ordinary crime thriller feel nightmarish. For all the gritty takes on the Western throughout cinema, the Coens’ classic stands apart as a movie that purges the genre of all the grandeur and the romance, leaving only lingering melancholy and despair. —WC 

33. ‘Shane’ (dir. George Stevens, 1953)

‘Shane’ is the quintessential Western, a story of a charismatic former gunfighter who tries to escape a mysterious past but becomes entangled in the land struggles of homesteading families in Wyoming. Using Shane’s interactions with the community, particularly the Starrett family, director Stevens explores survival in the American West, including the myth of the frontier, and the struggle between the encroaching civilization and ‘untamed’ wilderness.

Alan Ladd’s Shane embodies the archetypal Western hero with a dark past, while Jack Palance’s menacing gunslinger Jack Wilson is a compelling contrast. The unfolding drama against the expansive beauty of the West captured by DP Loyal Griggs actually does challenge the myth of the rugged individualist, though, presenting a more nuanced vision of frontier life where the proverb ‘it takes a village’ truly takes hold. The collective efforts of a community are essential for overcoming the challenges they face.

As a cultural artifact, ‘Shane’ does reflect the overall climate of 1950s America into which it was released. In hindsight, it was an exploration of post-World War II American unity against the era’s anxieties about the spread of communism.

In this context, it’s timeless, asking questions about an American identity that continues to shift. —TO

32. ‘Silver Lode’ (dir. Allan Dwan, 1954)

Allan Dwan, a contemporary of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille as pioneers of Hollywood movies, made Westerns in five different decade, all at least worthy, many excellent. But though he achieved his biggest acclaim making silent period adventure films with Douglas Fairbanks (1922’s ‘Robin Hood’ a massive success), what typifies his Westerns is combining elevated tension with limited violence. ‘Silver Lode’ is an exemplary example.

Dwan in the sound era usually made two to four features a year, many falling somewhere between A and B level productions. He regretted his contract with producer Benedict Bogeaus at RKO, yet somehow turned out a series of taut genre films, most shot by the great John Alton (best known as a key film noir DP) in color that came out of that partnership.

At a time when Hollywood was tip-toeing into post McCarthy-era films, unexpectedly one of the most effective is this story about a prominent businessman on the verge of marriage (John Payne) who’s wrongly accused of murder by a man named McCarty (Dan Duryea) posing as a marshal. Dwan, always known for his character studies whatever the scope of his films, focuses on how the townspeople are manipulated into hysteria and how difficult it is to defend someone against a thug.

A thrifty 81 minutes with not a dull moment, ‘Silver Lode’ is a gem found amid routine circumstances that didn’t seem exceptional when released, but now stands as an example of what could be accomplished within the genre when a pro who lived to make movies got his hands on a story with potential. —TB

31. ‘The Lusty Men’ (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose in Nicholas Ray’s glorious rodeo melodrama ‘The Lusty Men.’ It’s got one of the best, punchiest, most economical opening sequences of any Western ever, and also Robert Mitchum, and that should be enough. But it’s really wild to think about how this movie came out in 1952 — the same year as ‘High Noon,’ the period between John Ford making ‘Wagon Master’ and ‘The Searchers,’ aka Peak Hollywood Westerns — and it so deftly and thoroughly deconstructs the heroic status of the cowboy and the valor of the Western hero. It’s likely not the first of the gritty Neo-Westerns that have since enraptured Coen Brothers and Taylor Sheridan fans alike; but it is the Neo-Western that has an incredibly steamy situationship among Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and Susan Hayward.     Mitchum’s a burnt-out rodeo lifer who, to salvage his pride, Kennedy wants to be a bronco-riding real man. And Hayward wants safety and security from somebody. What’s at stake for all of them isn’t necessarily who will get with whom, but what does each of them need to take from the others in order to survive? The action’s great, the mood is greater, and the pace compliments them both — long stretches of desperation punctuated by sudden violence. This writer once heard a film professor talk about the challenges of ‘simmering’ a plot — you have to control the pace of the edit, and the specific shot choices, and the performances so they all hint at something, flavor it, but not overwhelm the palate until just the right moment. Nobody can create a marinade quite like Nicholas Ray, and ‘The Lusty Men’ packs one hell of a punch. —SS 

30. ‘Kill and Pray’ (dir. Carlo Lizzani, 1967)

The Spaghetti Western subgenre quickly became a vehicle for progressive politics. Leftist Italian filmmakers found the Old West to be the perfect way to hold a mirror to the present moment and address issues of race, gender, and class discrimination. (Unlike in the American Western, those who were aligned with the Confederacy are never anything but the vilest villains in the Spaghetti Western.) ‘Kill and Pray’ takes this even a step further by literally having Pier Paolo Pasolini play a socialist priest engaged in revolutionary struggle. He’s just a side character, but a notably direct reminder of where director Carlo Lizzani himself is coming from here.     Lou Castel plays Requiescant, an instantly legendary duelist who, raised by a preacher, prays over his nemeses after he guns them down with his lightning-quick trigger finger. Requiescant was a Mexican orphan taken in after his entire family was massacred by a genocidal Confederate named George Bellow Ferguson (Mark Damon), whose appearance becomes increasingly pasty and vampiric. If there is any singular inspiration for Calvin Candie in ‘Django Unchained’ it has to be here with Ferguson. At one point, he even engages in a game where he forces a beautiful Mexican woman to hold a candelabra while he tries to shoot out the flames from an ever-increasing distance. Damon, who parlayed his acting career into becoming an indie film buyer and producer (and died on May 12, 2024, shortly before he would have been seen once again at Cannes), turns in an all-time great villain performance. Not only did his character kill Requiescant’s whole family, he also forces Requiescant’s adopted sister into prostitution! (That adopted sister was actually played by Damon’s then-wife, Barbara Frey.)      ‘Kill and Pray’ also represents a couple other trends notable to the Spaghetti Western post-Dollars Trilogy: Most of these movies go under multiple titles, so this film is also commonly called ‘Requiescant’ as well as ‘Kill and Say Your Prayers’ and ‘Let Them Rest.’ Also, like so many other Spaghetti Westerns, it does not let its progressive politics get in the way of featuring a parade of gorgeous actresses in sexy attire, much the way the original ‘Star Trek’ always paired serious social issues with scantily clad women. A unique ‘60s phenomenon: Call it babe-centric liberalism. —CB 

29. ‘Black God, White Devil’ (dir. Glauber Rocha, 1963)

Everybody always talks about the influence of Kurosawa — particularly ‘Yojimbo’ — on the development of the Spaghetti Western. Much more rarely do they mention Glauber Rocha’s polemical Brazilian Western, about a farmhand (Geraldo del Rey) who kills his boss when denied his wages, then goes on the run with his wife, running afoul of a liberation-theology-tinged agrarian revolution in the process. They should mention it.    ‘Black God, White Devil’ premiered in Competition at Cannes in 1964, a full four months before ‘Yojimbo’ remake ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ premiered and kicked off the Spaghetti craze. And ‘Black God, White Devil’ has all the hallmarks the Italian directors to come would seize upon. There’s heightened violence — a scene of ritualistic infanticide literally drew gasps from the MoMA crowd when shown there in recent years — and a bounty hunter character who lives by an enigmatic code in Antonio das Mortes, absurdist plotting, and a starkly political dimension. It even has something else that the Spaghetti filmmakers would end up loving: franchise potential. Yes, that Antonio das Mortes character, played by Mauricio do Valle, would appear in two follow-up films. But above all, ‘Black God, White Devil’ shows how pulpy genre storytelling can be a supreme vehicle for ideas; entertainment value can always make a manifesto-worthy polemic go down easier. —CB

28. ‘Dead Man’ (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Jim Jarmusch doesn’t stretch himself to work in new genres so much as he stretches genres to fit himself. A cultural omnivore whose extensive knowledge is often masked by his aura of far being too cool for whatever medium he works with, the auteur has managed to filter everything from samurai films and vampire love stories through the lens of his own punk rock slacker brilliance. So it should have come as no surprise that his one foray into Westerns is arguably the most singular work of postmodernism the genre has ever seen. Starring Johnny Depp as an accountant named William Blake who flees through the West after committing a murder, ‘Dead Man’ sees Jarmusch gleefully mashing together influences ranging from 19th century poetry and acid rock into a psychological study of life and death in America. The film is equally notable for its Neil Young soundtrack and elements of psychedelia as its nuanced portrayals of Native Americans, many of whom speak to each other in native languages without subtitles. Westerns are often mislabeled as a dead genre whose only modern purpose is to cultivate nostalgia for the past, but ‘Dead Man’ is the perfect counterpoint to that line of thinking. It’s a film that proves Westerns still offer a rich blank canvas to any artist brave enough to attempt something new with them. —CZ

27. ‘Blazing Saddles’ (dir. Mel Brooks, 1974)

‘Blazing Saddles’ is often cited as a movie that could never be made today. Well, thank goodness it was made in 1974. ‘Blazing Saddles’ was the third film directed by Mel Brooks, and it is probably the first one that comes to mind at the mention of his name. ‘Blazing Saddles’ was, of course, a sendup of the Western genre; a parody amalgamation of so many of the serious films on this very list. It’s almost certainly the only one in which a man punches out a horse. Cleavon Little plays Bart, the new sheriff in (a very racist) town. Gene Wilder is the town drunk Jim, Harvey Korman is Hedy, I mean, Hedley Lamarr, and Madeline Kahn is the Oscar nominee of the bunch — for acting. Brooks was also nominated for writing the title track’s lyrics with music by John Morris. —TM

26. ‘The Misfits’ (dir. John Huston, 1961)

The West, as a concept, has always been synonymous with freedom, of an escape from society’s restrictions. A modern Western, ‘The Misfits’ translates that yearning for something new and unformed out of the pioneering days and into the ennui of modern existence. The eponymous misfits are a motley crew — played by magnetic movie stars Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, all surprisingly believable as rough-on-their-luck losers — who abandon their humdrum lives to camp a half-completed home in the middle of untouched Nevada land. Lust, jealousy, and discontent poison their attempts to build a paradise in the scorching sun, and yet John Huston’s film (with a typically contemplative script from Arthur Miller) still proves beguiling in how it captures the appeal of running away from civilization and into the wide-open desert. —WC  

25. ‘The Tall T’ (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1957)

In a Budd Boetticher Western, it’s the landscape that matters most. Not just in terms of the harsh rocks and desert that fill his frames, but also the roles each character he studies feel they must take on in order to survive the horrors of the American West. Everyone has their own code to live by, some more ruthless than others, but all governed by a desire to see another sunrise. With ‘The Tall T,’ Boetticher tests those codes by putting a rancher caught in the wrong place at the wrong time against the conflicting wits of three murderous thieves who end up robbing the wrong coach and need to pivot their plan. The film isn’t exactly a real-time thriller, but it plays out in such a quick, direct manner as to evoke an almost theatrical morality play.

Like ‘3:10 to Yuma’ and other Westerns of the time, the film’s script was adapted from a story by Elmore Leonard called ‘The Captives’ and plays on the more psychological elements of the Western experience. In placing his rancher Brennan (played by Randolph Scott, who’s his partner and star in all of the ‘Ranown Cycle’ of films) and copper mine heiress Ms. Mims (Mia Farrow’s mother Maureen O’Sullivan) in a position where they must kill to live, Boetticher cuts to the dark reality of life on the frontier with little sentimentality. —HR

24. ‘Man of the West’ (dir. Anthony Mann, 1958)

Can even the worst among us be redeemed? That’s the premise of Anthony Mann’s supremely refined character study starring Gary Cooper, a reformed member of a vile gang headed by Lee J. Cobb, who finds himself crossing paths with the gang once again. They, of course, want him back in the fold. He wants no part of it, even as his skills are such that he realizes they’ll probably never leave him alone now. Does he go along with them at least for a while? Maybe to protect the saloon singer (Julie London) in his company? How much can you pretend to be a thing without becoming the thing? And how could he have ever ridden with this gang in the first place?     Here’s a Western about one’s capacity to lead many lives and even become a different person. There aren’t a lot of genuine paths for redemption in American society, but the West, the frontier, unspoiled by civilization and its baggage, at least offered a potential clean slate — a tabula rasa that alone elevated the idea of the Western to the idea of myth in the American mindset. Out there you could become anybody. Maybe even a better person. With Cooper’s character in ‘Man of the West,’ that potential is put to its limit.     What’s particularly unique about Cooper’s Westerns is how often his characters have a sympathetic understanding of women. That’s once again the case here as he becomes Julie London’s champion even as his old gang horribly demeans her, even forcing her to do a striptease at gunpoint that’s about as devastating a critique of the male gaze as classic Hollywood ever offered up. —CB 

23. ‘Pale Rider’ (dir. Clint Eastwood, 1985)

Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Western was his first film in the genre since 1976 (when he made the brilliant “The Outlaw Josey Wales”) and the first major Hollywood studio Western in five years after the commercial failure of “Heaven’s Gate” all but killed the tradition. It was a big hit, and it’s not hard to see why: Eastwood’s film has the perfect blend of classical satisfactions and revisionist tweaks, as he and his ‘Gauntlet’ screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack take the raw materials of ‘Shane’ and rework them for a 1980s audience. Eastwood plays an enigmatic figure who emerges out of nowhere to help a community of ragtag miners take on the corporation that hopes to wipe them off the face of the earth; he’s the literal answer to their prayers, and Eastwood expertly rides the line between presenting his character as a mortal man or a creature of supernatural origins. He could plausibly be either, and part of the film’s fun is its refusal to pick a side.

Throughout the movie Eastwood balances the gritty, earthbound, and sociopolitical (addressing ecological concerns of the era from a liberal perspective that might surprise younger audiences who only know him as the guy who talked to the chair at the Republican National Convention) with the lyrical, allegorical, and poetic. The result is one of the director’s best films, a movie that somehow feels both reliably old-fashioned and utterly modern at the same time. —JH      

22. ‘Red River’ (dir. Howard Hawks, 1948)

On the Chisholm trail that stretches from Texas to Missouri, Thomas Dunson (John Wayne, already the mythic marquee man of the Western genre by 1948) leads a tense 1851 cattle drive that blows open tensions with his adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift. ‘Red River’ was adapted by director Howard Hawks and screenwriters Borden Chase and Charles Schnee from Borden Chase’s story ‘Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail,’ here painting an epic canvas via the American Midwest about how relationships between men are destroyed by a good woman, and each other.

But beyond the morally complex antihero played by Wayne, Clift is a standout in his breakout screen performance — and in a movie that feels like a precursor to ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ Clift’s character Matt Garth forms an instantly intense friendship with another gunslinging cattler, the wonderfully named Cherry Valance (John Ireland). One of the movie’s great scenes finds the two men doing a kind of ‘I’ll show you yours if you show you mine’ with their guns. Make of that what you will.

Along the way, the wagoners rescue a train of gamblers and dance hall girls from a Native attack, including Joanne Dru as Tess Millay, who’s immediately drawn to Matt. He at first couldn’t be less interested, though the movie trots off toward an eventual happy union for them both. Still, ‘Red River’ remains a rare early example of a bittersweet tenderness shared between two frontiersmen, and one that could easily be interpreted as queer by now. Clift’s sexuality had not yet become the subject of tabloid scrutiny that it would, but Hawks knew what he was doing while casting him in this elegiac Western about the erosion of tradition. No wonder Peter Bogdonavich excerpted it for ‘The Last Picture Show,’ as the final movie that play’s for that film’s wayward characters in a shuttering movie theater. The two films feel like bookends for a dying new frontier. —RL

21. ‘The Big Country’ (dir. William Wyler, 1958)

A domestic drama that plays out in epic, gun-totin’, fist-throwin’ fashion, ‘The Big Country’ serves as an allegory for America’s historical struggle to ‘love thy neighbor’ and how our inability to do so may ultimately lead to our demise. It also serves as a fish-out-of-water rom-com for its main character Jim McKay (Gregory Peck), a sea captain of high regard brought out to Texas at the request of his would-be bride (Carroll Baker) to meet her father and get to know the ranch life, but who ends up falling for a down-to-earth teacher (Jean Simmons) who just so happens to control one of the area’s few water sources. The irony is that Mckay comes to find the West not so different from the sea. Riding a horse is a bit like riding a wave. On land, like on water, you can still use the stars and a compass to guide your way.  

And yet the rules of this vast and unruly terrain seem governed by a winner-take-all attitude that McKay can’t abide. He thinks he can play peace-keeper between the two warring ranch families that populate small corners spread hundreds of miles apart: His bride’s upper-crust brand, the Terrills, and a ruffian clan with a little more dirt under their fingernails, the Hannasseys, led by an imposing Burl Ives, who won an Oscar for his role. But eventually, McKay comes to find that out in the big country, you can only take care of yourself. Captured in beautiful Technicolor by William Wyler and shot on location, this Western has a little bit of everything, but stays true to the ethos of its main genre by not pulling any of its punches. —HR 

20. ‘The Wind’ (dir. Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Directed by the great Swedish filmmaker, actor, and chronicler of human suffering Victor Sjöström, and adapted for the screen by Frances Marion, ‘The Wind’ is one of the most psychologically terrifying depictions of the harsh weather and crippling loneliness of the American West. The film stars the incomparable Lillian Gish as a fragile young woman named Letty who travels from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). When his wife Cora (Dorothy Cumming) forces her to leave their ranch in a fit of jealousy, she must choose between being the mistress of a lecherous neighbor (Montagu Love) or marrying a kind man (Lars Hanson) whom she does not love. Although the film ends on a happy note, much to the chagrin of its star and director, who preferred the ending of Dorothy Scarborough’s original novel in which Letty finally succumbs to her prairie madness and wanders off into a windstorm to die, the film remains one of the silent era’s greatest artistic achievements. —MG

19. ‘High Noon’ (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

The genius of ‘High Noon’ is that it can be enjoyed on two levels. The first is a quintessential tale of good versus evil, a showdown between a band of unruly crooks and Gary Cooper’s moralistic deputy fighting alone to save his town and his bride (Grace Kelly, so beautiful she looks like a Disney princess even playing a modest Quaker). Fred Zinnemann’s movie certainly has the chops to pass as just pure entertainment, so immaculately is it paced and structured to thrill.

The second level is more interesting, as one of the earliest revisionist Westerns to challenge the black-and-white worldview of the genre. Cooper’s Will Kane might think he’s doing the right thing, but the town around him doesn’t necessarily agree, turning away from helping him out of fear, out of bitterness, out of a belief that they would be better off without him. Carl Foreman’s script richly develops one of the Western’s most memorable settings, populating Hadleyville with an array of characters both pathetic (Lloyd Bridges’ sniveling Harvey Pell) and sympathetic (Katy Jurado’s hard-luck Helen Ramirez), and imbuing a deep sense of history and pain lurking underneath the seemingly sunny desert civilization. When Kane rides off into the sunset at the film’s conclusion, it’s not with the triumph we expect from a cowboy hero but with the anger of a man unsure if those he saved were worth the effort. —WC 

18. ‘Unforgiven’ (dir. Clint Eastwood, 1992)

‘It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got, and everything he’s ever gonna have.’

At its best, the Western genre is the closest thing that America has to Shakespearean tragedy. The vast American West provides a canvas for writers to sink their teeth into the ugliest questions of life and death, good and evil, revenge and repentance, and love and solitude. Philosophizing cowboys have uttered many of the most poetic lines in the American film canon, but few pierce the soul more deeply and concisely than this timeless remark by Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny during his final job as a bounty hunter. It’s a fitting summary of not just the movie’s unrelenting moral inquiry, but also Eastwood’s own journey within the Western genre. Nearly half a century into a film career that’s still going strong 30 years later, Eastwood had seen the genre from every possible angle, from the sanitized patriotism of 1950s television to the wordless violence of Spaghetti Westerns and everything in between. A movie like ‘Unforgiven’ could only have been made by a man with so much of his own experience to reckon with.

Eastwood’s farewell to the genre (his 2021 film ‘Cry Macho’ may have been another epilogue to his Western career, but there’s no denying that ‘Unforgiven’ is his true swan song) marries the epic cinematography of John Ford’s masterpieces with the harshness of Leone’s best works. Eastwood might have spent much of the 1970s and 80s distancing himself from Westerns, but ‘Unforgiven’ was the final reminder that no genre will ever be a better vehicle for his distinct voice. —CZ

17. ‘The Great Silence’ (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1968)

When the average person closes their eyes and pictures the American West, most will default to images of arid deserts, red rock formations, and vast plains filled with cattle. But it’s important to remember that the West wasn’t just a diorama that captured a few picturesque moments: it was a living region with all of the harshness and beauty that the four seasons provide.

The entire Atlantic Ocean separated Sergio Corbucci from America when he filmed his spaghetti Westerns, but ‘The Great Silence’ proves that he understood Western weather as well as any American filmmaker. The Italian film takes place during a brutal Utah blizzard, following a wordless gunman who seeks to protect a group of criminals from a band of mercenaries who will stop at nothing to collect the bounties on their heads. The bitter cold and copious amounts of snow provide a backdrop that’s every bit as trying as the hottest day in Death Valley, and Corbucci uses it as a canvas to portray a level of bleakness and brutality seldom seen in Westerns before the 1960s. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s black-hatted antihero was a revelation, firing a semi-automatic weapon instead of a six shooter and refusing to utter even the few choice badass words that were considered a necessary baseline for strong-and-silent tough guys. More conflicted, violent, and vulnerable than the characters Western fans were used to seeing, he was a bold step forward in a genre that was still struggling to accept moral nuance.

The film’s winter setting and Ennio Morricone score made ‘The Great Silence’ an obvious inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ but Corbucci’s film stands on its own as perhaps the most iconic spaghetti western directed by someone not named Sergio Leone. —CZ

16. ‘The Searchers’ (dir. John Ford, 1956)

John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ is one of the last classic Westerns, when the West was still romantic, the view was vast and beautiful, and we knew who the good guys and bad guys were. But it’s remained enduring because Ford makes us wrestle with the vicious racism of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Wayne plays a man willing to shoot out the eyes of a dead and buried Comanche to make his spirit wander purgatory for eternity. He’ll slay a herd of buffalo to keep the Comanche from eating that winter, and he’ll spend years aiming to kill his own niece now that she’s been living among them. It’s a phenomenal performance by Wayne, spiteful and sarcastic as he’s ever been but also as magnetic; he’s at his finest as he whips the sheath off his rifle with style and intensity. But the ravishing Technicolor and majesty on display is at odds with Ethan’s hate, and the tension that builds of what he’ll do when he finds young Debbie keeps us going. The film’s famous final shot, of Wayne boxed within a door frame, seems like a farewell to this era of filmmaking, a realization that there’s no place in this peaceful world for the lone gunman like him. —BW

15. ‘Winchester ’73’ (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950)

‘Winchester ‘73’ starts as a classic meet-cute — between Man and Gun. James Stewart’s Lin McAdam wins the fastest, most killingest gun in the West in a shootout in Dodge City, surely as The Founders intended. But alas! He loses the gun, and to his no-good brother of all people, whom he then must chase across the landscape to retrieve what’s rightfully his. This is, it must be said, kind of a silly hook for a movie — or it would be, in less adept hands, because director Anthony Mann doesn’t mostly follow Stewart around; he mostly follows the gun. ‘Winchester ’73’ bops from owner to owner and story to story like the angel of death itself. The suspense of how someone gains and loses the mighty repeating rifle, and if they’ll have to pay with their life, make each successive episode more intriguing. Every time we check back in with Stewart, too, his nerves become increasingly frayed, drawing him nearer to mania.     This is the joy of Stewart and Mann’s collaborations, really. You’re riveted to the spectacle of watching an ostensibly coolheaded, together person absolutely lose his fool mind. ‘Winchester ’73’ delights in amplifying the swirling currents of aggression and obsession throughout each leg of the journey. By the time we get to the final shootout between the brothers (don’t worry, the rifle finds its way back to them), their murderous rage far outstrips the motivation provided by the plot. A staging of the Cain and Abel story couldn’t ask for a harsher backdrop than the one Mann finds here — the jagged, barren rocks are a tortured landscape of the mind made visual. The famous sequence is staged and edited with razor precision. “Winchester ’73” is not only one of the most structurally interesting Westerns ever made, it’s one of the best ones, too. —SS 

14. ‘Ride the High Country’ (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1962)

An early film from ‘Wild Bunch’ director Sam Peckinpah, ‘Ride the High Country’ is a hidden gem with an abundance of grit around the edges. Genre veterans Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea are wonderfully weary as the amoral heroes of the story, aging lawmen traveling across California to deliver a shipment of gold to the bank. With Ron Starr’s brash young Heck and Mariette Hartley’s rebellious Elsa by their side, they embark on a journey that doubles as a last hurrah, even if they don’t say it. Peckinpah’s film often feels like a bridge between the classic Westerns of old and the darker, more realistic Westerns that would follow, telling its straightforward story with a heavy spoonful of cynicism. Peckinpah doesn’t shy away from showcasing the flaws of his heroes or the harsh realities of the frontier, including the constant threat of sexual violence that Elsa faces even from the men who are supposed to protect her. That makes McCrea’s performance as a man trying to do the right thing all the more moving, a needed ray of hope in an otherwise exquisitely unforgiving landscape. —WC  

13. ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ (dir. Sergio Leone, 1966)

Indisputably one of the greatest and most iconic of all Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ is so influential — and such an immaculate slab of pure cinema — that watching it for the first time feels like a spell of déjà vu, and watching it for the 50th time feels like a sublime discovery. That strange, uniquely filmic sort of vertigo befits a stand-alone saga that was made as the third chapter of a trilogy even though it takes place before the other two; a revisionist masterpiece that pushed an exhausted genre forward by returning it to its most basic elements. Viscerally timeless long before people knew it was immortal, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ is rooted in a mesmerizing duel between the immediacy of close-up violence and the ultra-wide sweep of mythic storytelling, a dynamic that’s reflected by the symphonic rhythms of its editing and the funereal ecstasy of Ennio Morricone’s score alike. 

It starts with Leone’s most basic plot, which is then stretched across his most epic canvas, as the desperate search for a buried cache of Confederate gold amid the mass death of the Civil War becomes a microcosm for the banality of violence, and therefore a satire of the Western genre on the whole. Its nameless hero is the simplest and most classic of Western archetypes, only more so, as Eastwood elevates the whole ‘terse gunslinger’ mystique to such cartoonish heights that it becomes impossible to separate truth from legend). His antagonists are a pair of adjectives who Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef infuse with such dimensional scumminess that you’d need an entire dictionary to describe them. The Mexican stand-offs between these characters mess with time in a way that only the movies ever could, as split-second draws are stretched far beyond the logic that limits most art. It’s the language of a film that has always belonged to then, now, and forever; an epic that remains utterly inimitable even as its impact continues to bleed deeper and deeper into the fabric of storytelling itself. —DE

12. ‘Rio Bravo’ (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959)

No filmmaker better embodied the early 20th century archetype of a studio system journeyman better than Howard Hawks. Switching between genres at a whiplash-inducing pace, Hawks found a way to make Hollywood classics out of just about every script he was given and imbued them with his signature concerns and personal style. A case could be made that he directed some of the best screwball comedies (‘Bringing Up Baby’ and ‘His Girl Friday’), film noir (‘The Big Sleep’), musicals (‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’), and gangster movies (‘Scarface’) of all time — and that’s before you even get to his greatest contribution to the Western genre, ‘Rio Bravo.’

The film, which stars John Wayne as a small town sheriff who enlists the help of a young gunfighter (Ricky Nelson) and a local drunk (Dean Martin) to aid him in detaining a dangerous but politically powerful criminal until a U.S. Marshall arrives to pick him up, could be classified as one of Hollywood’s first hangout movies. Much of the first two acts contain minimal action, but the time flies by due to Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett’s witty script and Hawks’ confidence in the chemistry between the three leading men. And while the film’s glorious concluding battle more than makes up for lost time, it’s easy to see how ‘Rio Bravo’ paved the way for modern auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, who gleefully satirized the banality of evil with their juxtaposition of casual dialogue and grotesque violence.

You can tell how Hawks’ background directing other genres prepared him to mine so much entertainment out of such a minimalistic script — ‘Rio Bravo’ pretty much gives you exactly what you’d expect a Western directed by the man who made ‘His Girl Friday.’ It’s a culmination of decades spent making films about the folly of human life in its many forms, which is why it still feels like one of the most gleefully human Westerns ever made. —CZ

11. ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (dir. Edwin S. Porter, 1903)

At just 12 minutes long, Edwin S. Porter’s one-reel wonder ‘The Great Train Robbery’ is a foundational cinematic text. Inspired by the more complex films being made abroad by the Brighton School in England and George Méliès in France, Porter tapped into the mythology of the American West — and the growing popularity of train-related entertainment — to craft his own thrilling, thoroughly American adventure. Likely taking its name from Scott Marble’s popular stage melodrama ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1896) and riffing on recent sensational events like the 1900 robbery of a Union Pacific Railroad train by Butch Cassidy and his gang, the film follows outlaws who rob a train while it’s stopped at a station, flee into the mountains, and then succumb to a posse of armed locals. The film’s indelible final image, in which an outlaw fires his gun directly at the camera, has been referenced countless times throughout the course of film and television history. —MG

10. ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (dir. John Ford, 1962)

John Ford was never shy about interrogating the genre that he helped to invent; few other filmmakers so earned the right, and even fewer so fearlessly embraced that right as a prerogative. And yet none of Ford’s movies questioned the foundational myths of American Westerns — and of the American West itself — more directly than ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ a sprawling but stagelike negotiation between frontier justice and the rule of law set in the heart of a country that has always struggled to believe the story it tells about itself. 

A morally ambiguous fable shot in austere black-and-white (in stark contrast to the Technicolor sweep of films like ‘The Searchers’), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ flips the Western formula on its head. The mysterious stranger who blows into town isn’t a gunslinging John Wayne (iconic as a trigger-happy farmer), but rather a bookish James Stewart, who hopes to prepare the area for potential statehood. He’s robbed and left for dead by Lee Marvin before he even gets to Shinbone. 

Of course, it will take more than that to stop Ransom Stoddard — a future senator in a land of “dudes” and “pilgrims” — from trying to civilize this lawless slice of the American wild, an effort that ultimately compels him to strike an ambivalent compromise between fact and fiction, constitutional ideals and the reality of living with them. In that light, ‘Print the legend’ could be seen as the Western’s most pyrrhic victory since the end of ‘Seven Samurai.’ Ransom’s supposed heroism catapults him to great political success, but only by educating him on the contradiction in terms between truth, justice, and the American way. To this day, few movies have better articulated how this country works, and even fewer have better articulated how it doesn’t. —DE

9. ‘The Shooting’ (dir. Monte Hellman, 1967)

‘Easy Rider’ put Jack Nicholson on the map, but three years earlier he produced and co-starred in Monte Hellman’s ‘The Shooting,’ an early example of the ‘acid Western’ that brought the ‘60s counterculture to horseback. Warren Oates plays Willet Gashade, a former bounty hunter tasked to escort a mystery woman with money to burn. She makes them veer off course and pursue an unspecified target, and soon the mystery turns into a hostage situation when Jack shows up and bluntly threatens to ‘blow your face off.’ Hellman’s West is desolate, empty, and surreal, and the score of plodding, baritone piano is a world away from the operatic sweep of Ennio Morricone’s work. ‘The Shooting’ is about the chase, not the why or who, though it has a gripping and abrupt finale that provides just an ounce of closure. —BW

8. ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1972)

‘Hawk. Goin’ for the Musselshell. Take me a week’s ridin’, and he’ll be there in… hell, he’s there already.’     Exhibit A for why Sydney Pollack needs to be regarded far more favorably than the Oscar-bait-peddling director he’s sometimes labeled, ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ is the most poetic of all Westerns. If the West was a place to start anew, to begin life again, to become someone else, it hasn’t always offered up a new cinematic grammar to convey that potential for rebirth: ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ does. Edward Anhalt and John Milius’s spare script, uniquely sad and introspective, was inspired by the poetry of Carl Sandburg as well as 19th-century vernacular.      Jeremiah, an Army veteran who leaves civilization behind to become a Mountain Man in the wilds of Utah, speaks little throughout the movie; the characters he meets along the way talk far more. This is a movie about doing, about gestures, about everything that acting entails beyond dialogue. It’s why a GIF of star Robert Redford, all grizzled and bearded, his legendary handsomeness hidden, giving a nod of approval, became a Twitter meme. But this movie about a deeply antisocial individual is so much more than social media fodder.      It’s about how our lives are made up in the edit we create for ourselves in our own heads, and the tenuous webs of affection we weren’t even seeking that give it all meaning: There’s a point in the middle where Johnson, an obvious PTSD sufferer, has created a newfound family with an Indigenous woman and a mute child. None can speak the same language, as it were, but all can ultimately understand each other perfectly. When the worst happens, and he loses his family, Redford achieves the most refined acting of his career: Staring into the fire he’s set to consume their one-time home, the slightest of smiles crossing his lips as the memory of them sustains him, even as he needs to find a new, more violent source of meaning.     It’s the quiet of ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ that sticks with you. It’s a movie that allows you to look within yourself as you’re watching it, just the way so many Western characters are ultimately in search of themselves. As for Jeremiah… some folks say, he’s up there still. —CB 

7. ‘Stagecoach’ (dir. John Ford, 1939)

The Western genre is too vast and varied to be distilled down to a single film — or at least, it would be, if ‘Stagecoach’ didn’t exist. The earliest classic Western of the sound era from John Ford, featuring genre icon John Wayne in his breakthrough role, ‘Stagecoach’ practically birthed the golden age of the Western, and turned the five square miles of Monument Valley into the definitive landscape of the American West. Like many genre-defining works, ‘Stagecoach’ is an exceedingly simple story, following a motley group of passengers on a Stagecoach headed to New Mexico. While there are colorful personalities — from a snobbish Southern belle to a timid liquor salesman (the unforgettable Donald Meek, who’s looked after quite closely by Thomas Mitchell’s character) — the standout is Wayne’s Ringo Kid, a bad boy with a heart of gold whose simple masculinity charms the edgy, troubled prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor), and the audience as well. Even in this early Western, you see sly subversion of the black-and-white morality people often ascribe to the genre, with the outlaw and the lady of ill repute as the heroes, and a focus on fraying tensions between people representing different areas of society. Still, it’s the action, which remains so visceral and exciting today, that proves the main attraction. ‘Stagecoach’ isn’t necessarily timeless — it’s marred, like so many Westerns, by stereotypical and one-dimensional portrayals of Native Americans as one-note antagonists — but the thrilling eight-minute climactic salt flat chase will live on in the DNA of action and adventure movies for decades more to come. —WC 

6. ‘Ride Lonesome’ (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1959)

All Westerns are on some level about the application of violence. The films of Budd Boetticher, however, are uniquely attuned to the cost of violence, the memory of it, the way it affects the very landscape. None of his Ranown cycle Westerns with star Randolph Scott are over 80 minutes, but ‘Ride Lonesome’ most perfectly distills his essential concerns: Scott plays bounty hunter Ben Brigade, a hired killer, the kind of profession you don’t see in John Ford movies, certainly not as your lead character. Brigade seems singularly minded to bring an outlaw named Billy John (James Best) to justice, but curiously, takes an overly roundabout way to escort the captured gunslinger back to town where the hangman’s noose awaits him. That’s because Brigade is really trying to draw out Billy’s brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef), who killed Brigade’s wife years ago. Frank hanged her from a dead old tree, its gnarled branches like the most warped crucifix you’ve ever seen. Brigade stages it so that his final showdown with Frank takes place by that very same tree. The thing about violence, too, is how quickly people can forget about it. When Frank admits he actually had forgotten he killed Brigade’s wife, Brigade has a very true-to-life reply: ‘A man can do that.’     The elements to this story are incredibly simple, but Boetticher directs it all with the highest emotional impact. Look at the way he uses the frame throughout ‘Ride Lonesome’ — at all times there’s a world lurking beyond the edges of the screen. At one moment, Scott stiffens in his saddle, clearly seeing something off-camera that we don’t, as he’s riding. The camera keeps pace with him until we see a Mescalero war party finally enter the frame in the far distance, his riding companion Pernell Roberts oblivious. Most other directors even then would have added a couple more shots to telegraph what’s happening with the edit. But Boetticher has the intelligence and skill to convey a huge lesson about movies and about life in this one continuous shot instead: You’re only aware of that which you can see, and the world continues far beyond your field of vision. —CB  

5. ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ (dir. Robert Altman, 1971)

Robert Altman was a director of such strong vision and style that no matter what genre he tackled, it would be twisted into a completely new form. From comedies like ‘M*A*S*H’ to detective stories like ‘The Long Goodbye,’ his films eschew conventions in favor of a vibe and a tone that can only be described as Altmanesque. Perhaps his most radical genre experiement, ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ throws out the adventure and the action of the Western in favor of a moody, psychological character study, zooming in on two of the most fascinating characters in Western history.  

As played by Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, the mysterious gambler and British madame of the title are richly shaded characters, petty and fueled by vices, with a romantic connection that never fully dethaws into true love. They can’t, really, when the snowy world of Presbyterian Church, Washington is so harsh and unforgiving, a place where you need to scrap by to get ahead. Altman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shoot this landscape with a dreamy, evocative lens, but Altman always roots the film in the reality of life in the west, where citizens are just tools and obstacles for the corporations controlling their way of life. Its ending may be the bleakest in all of the genre’s history, a reminder that, for all that the genre loves to make its cowboys and mavericks and individualistic men bigger than life, in real life these men would typically just be forgotten. —WC 

4. ‘For a Few Dollars More’ (dir. Sergio Leone, 1965)

Italian artists have obsessed over the American West at least since Giacomo Puccini premiered his opera ‘La fanciulla del West’ (‘The Girl of the West’), about Gold Rush miners, Wells Fargo agents, and bandits in 1910. Somehow the great composer saw in the Western — then a form that already existed in early movies such as ‘The Great Train Robbery,’ actual circus-like live shows, and novels like Owen Wister’s ‘The Virginian’ — a canvas on which to let loose a flood of emotion.     Fifty-five years later, Sergio Leone picked up the mantle and repaid the debt to opera in his second Spaghetti Western, a film where music takes on an unusual power to slow down and speed up time and turns the emotions latent in the Western into something truly explosive. ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ was a promising sketch, but ‘For a Few Dollars More’ reinvents the form altogether. Watch the gunfight in the church where Gian Maria Volante’s loathsome bandido El Indio forces a man, whose family he has just killed, to duel him by firing the moment that his watch chime stops ringing. In that moment, it’s not about the duel itself, it’s not about the outcome, it’s not about who lives or who dies… it’s not about what happens. It’s about how it happens. The waiting. The pauses between moments of significance are the most significant moments of all. Ennio Morricone’s chime theme guitar-strum-crescendos into an organ fugue as Leone cuts among closeups of all the faces of El Indio’s men. El Indio and his soon-to-be victim stare so deeply into each other you’d think they could see each others’ souls. When the violence itself comes, it’s an afterthought. Instead, you’re thinking how Morricone can do with a movie score what Michelangelo could do with ceilings. The way great composers could stretch out a singular moment to aria-length grandeur is the way Leone literally changed the experience of time itself here.     There’s nothing like this in the Western before ‘For a Few Dollars More.’ Puccini made a Western opera. Leone made the first truly operatic Western. —CB 

3. ‘My Darling Clementine’ (dir. John Ford, 1946)

John Ford made 14 sound-era westerns, eight of which starred John Wayne. But seven years after the seminal ‘Stagecoach’ made a star out of Wayne, Ford starred Henry Fonda in top form as charismatic Tombstone Sheriff Wyatt Earp, patiently tipping a porch chair with his long legs as he waits to spring into action. Kurosawa and Miyazaki are among the directors who deem this Monument Valley Western Ford’s best. In ‘About John Ford,’ Lindsay Anderson wrote: ‘if ‘Stagecoach’ was very good prose, ‘My Darling Clementine’ was poetry.’

Shot in elegant high-contrast black-and-white by Joseph McDonald, Ford uses a well-known Western myth to explore the tensions between wilderness and civilization: the events leading up to the shootout at the O.K. Corral, when the Earp brothers and an ailing Doc Holiday (Victor Mature) finally confront the cattle-stealing Clantons, led by Old Man Clanton (a terrifying Walter Brennan). While Ford fictionalized much of this movie, he had heard about the actual gunfight back in his silent western days from Earp himself, and shot the scene as accurately as he could.

The end result is the perfect balance of character study and landscape, myth and truth, romance and action. —AT

2. ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (dir. Sergio Leone, 1968)

When Sergio Leone’s epic Western was released in the U.S. in the summer of 1969 to little impact, suggesting that decades later it would rank with or even higher than its competitions that stellar season (‘The Wild Bunch,’ ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ ‘True Grit’) would seem as farcical as predicting in 1956 that ‘The Searchers’ would, by the 1970s, be seen by many as the greatest Western.

Burdened not just by stellar alternatives but also having to follow up three sleeper hits in the Man with No Name trilogy with a film not featuring Clint Eastwood (his Western that year was ‘Paint Your Wagon’), ‘Once’ lived up to the implication in its title of a story that encompasses a greatest hits of the genre.

And it delivers. The building of railroads, brutal fights over water rights, land speculation, revenge — all classic Western themes — are present, but overlapping and somehow congealing into a coherent whole. The writers apart from Leone included Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, with the former helping infuse it with Marxist shadings about the exploitation of workers and the evil tycoons who face little resistance.

But it parts from tradition in other ways. Its nominal lead character is female (a recently widowed homesteader, played by Claudia Cardinale), its lead villain Henry Fonda easily overcomes a lifetime of playing heroes, and Charles Bronson (in a role Eastwood turned down) a commanding presence with his harmonica playing substituting for dialogue much of the time.

A European production (though with some location work in Monument Valley as a link to the great American Westerns before it), it was a huge hit on the continent while it struggled in the U.S. It started to gain cult status, then grow in acclaim domestically after the 1984 restoration to its initial 165 minute length.

Major credit for its impact goes to Tonino Delli Colli’s sweeping Techniscope anamorphic cinematography realizing Leone’s vision. But above all, it is Ennio Morricone’s score, arguably the greatest among his many brilliant offerings, that clinches immortality for ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’ —TB

1. ‘Johnny Guitar’ (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1954)

The Western can be a lot of things — idealistic or gritty, traditional or modern, sturdy or stylized. But more than anything, the genre is male. From the minute John Wayne sauntered onto camera in ‘Stagecoach,’ Westerns have been inextricably linked with a strain of classical white masculinity — mostly glorifying it, sometimes critiquing it, but always centering it. So maybe that’s why cinema’s most surprising, unique, unforgettable Western is one that throws out all of that baggage and gives the audience something completely new, something that’s never been done before — or, really, since.  

‘Johnny Guitar’ opens like many classic Westerns do, with a barrel-chested cowboy riding into a remote desert town as his cheery theme song plays. It’s when our cowboy (Sterling Hayden) arrives at his destination — a remote, wind-swept Arizona saloon — that the qualities that make Nicholas Ray’s lurid Technicolor drama so distinct reveal themselves. More precisely, it’s when Joan Crawford appears on camera. As Vienna, the hardened proprietor of the establishment, she gives a performance unlike any other — sneering and mannered, with a simmering rage and lust that you can see in her eyes and hear in the way she spits out her lines like they’re daggers. The minute this singular woman, dressed in rather butch slacks and a dress shirt, arrives, it’s very clear that the title character only matters in relation to her. Hayden gives a heartfelt performance, but in ‘Johnny Guitar,’ the cowboy isn’t the star.  

Neither is he the villain, really, although there is an obligatory bandit in Scott Brady’s Dancin’ Kid. No, the real foil to Vienna’s uncouth kindness is the curdled and bitter Emma Small (a wild-eyed Mercedes McCambridge), a conservative reactionary who hates Vienna for reasons both personal and pathetic. The rivalry between these two women is delectably charged and fascinatingly psychological, one that’s long been interpreted through a queer lens. Regardless, their conflict is a conflict unlike that in almost any Western, one that positions the community itself as the villain witch-hunting those who live on their own terms rather than the restrictions placed upon them (it’s not a coincidence that the film was made during the peak of McCarthyism and anti-Communism sentiment in Hollywood). If the Western has fallen out of fashion and been dismissed as conservative and regressive, ‘Johnny Guitar’ shows how that conservatism is in no way inherent to the genre’s core.  

At the time of its release, ‘Johnny Guitar’ did well at the box office, but American critics didn’t know what to make of it; the common sentiment was that it was ‘kitschy.’ It found better reception in Europe, where future directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut praised it. Maybe it’s telling that it was international viewers who truly understood Ray’s vision, which sits so far outside of the American Western mythos that the USA has created. It’s the Western as a fairy tale, almost, an extravagant and poetic and terrifying melodrama coursing with lust, desire, hate, and despair. The film isn’t a particularly big production, setting most of its action in Vienna’s cavernous saloon. And yet it feels gigantic, a movie so distinct, imaginative, and affecting that it achieves epic status. Other Westerns may be more action-packed or gritty, but no Western cuts so deeply and singularly as ‘Johnny Guitar.’ —WC 

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What it's like to think about and want sex all the time — and the consequences

Veronica thinks about sex all the time.

She says while being constantly horny can be "lovely", it's often exhausting — and distracting.

While the stereotype of men always wanting sex and women doing what they can to avoid it might ring true for some, there are women like Veronica (who asked we don't use her real name) who feel ruled by sexual desire.

That can be tricky to navigate at times, according to sex educator Emily Nagoski, especially because there is a long history of telling women that pursuing sexual pleasure is reserved only for men.

So what happens when women are horny — really horny — all the time? ABC podcast Ladies We Need to Talk spoke to Ms Nagoski and a few sexually charged women to find out.

Understanding high sexual desire

There's not much research into why some women have higher sexual appetites than others, but Ms Nagoski says sexual response is the product of a balance between excitatory and inhibitory processes .

"The first part is the sexual excitation system — or the gas pedal.

"It noticed all the sex-related information and in the environment. That's everything you see, hear, smell, touch or taste.

"It notices all your internal bodily sensations and it notices everything you think, believe or imagine — anything it codes as being sex-related, and it sends that turn-on signal that many of us are familiar with."

She says fortunately, we also have the "brakes", which notice "all the good reasons" not to be turned on right now.

We all have different things that turn us on and off, and some people have more sensitive accelerators or brakes than others.

"Women with low sensitivity brakes tend to be the ones who engage in higher risk behaviours … that they know intellectually, have a higher risk of unwanted consequences," Ms Nagoski says.

How high sexual desire can impact relationships

Veronica's constant thoughts around sex have caused her feelings of shame.

She says her impulses mean she hasn't always practised safe sex, and some of her choices have ruined relationships.

"And I have ended up making some terrible mistakes with other people and hurting people; hurting my friends because of things I've done."

Veronica's high sexual desire also leads to awkward moments with strangers.

"I have ended up coming out with … a dirty joke or something … when obviously that's a very inappropriate thing to be saying to someone who I'm hiring to put gyprock on my walls."

In the early days of new relationships with men, Veronica says they're happy to "keep up". But it doesn't last.

It's something Sarah can relate to, who says she'd like to be having sex with her boyfriend once or twice a day. Instead, it's once or twice a week.

"It's really shitty on my self-esteem," says Sarah, who we've given a pseudonym.

"That is mainly due to … the stereotype that all men want it all the time.

"And so then I look at my boyfriend and think, why doesn't he want it all the time? Is there something wrong with him, or is there something wrong with me?"

Communicating about desire with your sexual partner

Talking about sex is typically more difficult than having it, says Ms Nagoski.

Communicating with our sexual partners about our desires is key to meeting one another's needs, she says.

"If your partner just isn't under any circumstances interested in having as much sex as you would like to have — you have a lot of options.

"Are there non-sex ways to get some of those needs met for high desire women?"

She for some people, sex is a powerful and efficient way to experience connection, but there are "a lot" of other ways to experience that.

Looking to Sarah as an example, Ms Nagoski says her partner may feel pressured to perform or obligated to have sex all the time — which is more often a brake as opposed to an accelerator.

Taking away the expectation or pressure around sex can for some people create room for desire to build, she says.

Although the mismatched sex drive with her partner sometimes makes Sarah feel rejected, she also calls it her superpower.

"I realise that I really love my capacity for pleasure … and I actually wouldn't trade that for the world."

Finding a sexual match

Jade, who also asked we keep her name confidential, didn't discover her high sexual desire until later in life.

She was in a heterosexual relationship with a sex life she described as "OK".

Jade began questioning her sexuality and eventually left the marriage. Sex with a woman for the first time was her sexual awakening.

"It was all-consuming to begin with … I couldn't really think of anything else."

When Jade met her now wife, they were having sex about seven times a day.

Four years later it happens about once most days. Jade says she's pleased their desires are evenly matched.

"I would be really disappointed if I was with someone who didn't have a sex drive like mine."

While we might feel sexually compatible with someone, Ms Nagoski says our interest in sex can fluctuate throughout life.

"It's really about how you feel about this moment in your life and the changes that are happening in your body, and what's going on with all of your relationships and your overall situation in life."

While high sexual desire "took over most of her life" for a long time, Veronica says she's more comfortable with it today and makes better decisions.

"It would have been nice if I could control it more, but I don't think I would change it."

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The Editorial Board

To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom.

President Biden has repeatedly and rightfully described the stakes in this November’s presidential election as nothing less than the future of American democracy.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a significant jeopardy to that democracy — an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust. He systematically attempted to undermine the integrity of elections. His supporters have described, publicly, a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system.

Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.

At Thursday’s debate, the president needed to convince the American public that he was equal to the formidable demands of the office he is seeking to hold for another term. Voters, however, cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.

The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.

Mr. Biden has been an admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.

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Some Democrats start calling for Biden to step aside and 'throw in the towel' on 2024

Some Democrats began calling for President Joe Biden to step aside so the party can nominate another candidate after he stumbled badly in Thursday's debate against his Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.

"This was like a champion boxer who gets in the ring past his prime and needs his corner to throw in the towel," said a Democratic lawmaker, adding that he meant Biden should exit the race.

The options for a switch are limited : If the president doesn't choose to leave of his own volition, there would have to be a revolt among Democratic National Convention delegates, the vast majority of whom were elected on their pledge to nominate Biden. But that's what some Democrats were thinking after Thursday night's debate.

It's “time to talk about an open convention and a new Democratic nominee,” said a second Democratic lawmaker who has been a solid Biden supporter.

The fear among these Democrats is that the version of Biden that showed up to the debate — one bearing a likeness to the caricature Trump and his allies have portrayed of a man unequipped for the job — cannot win in November.

Even those who want a replacement candidate doubt that the party can move Biden aside, aren’t certain who could win the party’s nod in his absence and don’t know whether a substitute could beat Trump in November. Going into the debate, which was hosted by CNN, polls showed a close race between Biden and Trump.“There is a sense of shock at how he came out at the beginning of this debate. How his voice sounded. He seemed a little disoriented. ... There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue,” David Axelrod, a top adviser to former President Barack Obama, said on CNN. “Only he can decide if he’s going to continue.”

Axelrod predicted that Biden wouldn’t be inclined to leave the race, noting that “this is a guy with a lot of pride ... who believes in himself.”

The last time a president who was eligible to run for re-election didn’t appear on the November ballot was in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson, facing certain defeat in the Democratic primaries, chose not to seek a full second term.

Still, several Democrats predicted that calls for Biden to take the Johnson route would multiply in the coming days.

“The chatter of replacement is absolutely going to explode,” said a veteran Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “There is no coming back from this disaster.”

At the same time, top Biden allies dismissed the prospect of a change at the top of the ticket. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat whom many in the party see as a potential Biden alternative or a future presidential candidate, said “no” when asked whether he would urge Biden to end his campaign.

“This is just bad, no matter how you spin it,” said a veteran Democratic operative. “But everyone knows it’s too late to switch. But the donors will make those decisions, as they always do. Hence why we got Biden” in 2020.

Before Thursday's debate, Trump's campaign released an ad telling voters that if they elect Biden, they will end up with Vice President Kamala Harris as president — a suggestion that the octogenarian president would die in office or have to resign. The biggest question Democrats would have to resolve if Biden dropped out of the race before the convention is whether they would nominate Harris — whose approval ratings , like Biden's, are underwater. Others who were mentioned Thursday night include Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

“I look forward to being in Chicago when Gavin Newsom is nominated from the floor,” a Democratic strategist said after the first 20 minutes of the debate, adding about Biden: “Should have gone on offense on abortion. Can’t keep his train of thought.”

A Biden departure would leave Democrats with a potentially brutal fight over whether to simply elevate Harris, the first Black vice president and first female vice president — one that could split key base constituencies at a time when the party needs to unite if it hopes to win. Still, the prospect of a bloody intraparty battle didn't stop some operatives from concluding Biden should go.

"They need to change nomination now," a Democratic operative said. "Or just put Harris on top of the ticket."

A Democratic strategist with ties to Capitol Hill said lawmakers will be reluctant to publicly call for Biden to give up his campaign.

"No one wants to be the first," the strategist said. "But everyone is brushing up on DNC rules and procedures right now."

The same strategist explained his own affection for Biden and his record, pointing to the president's responses to wars in Europe and the Middle East, his personnel appointments and his domestic record — along with Biden's 2020 victory over Trump. But the strategist also thinks Biden must exit.

"I am for the first time beginning to think calling for Biden to step aside isn't heretical; it's the only responsible thing to do," he said. "If we lose this election to Trump because we were too afraid to admit we were wrong about his age or too worried of an open convention, we can no longer call our party the defenders of democracy."

Several current and former Democratic elected officials chose to keep their powder dry when asked about Biden's showing Thursday night.

"The best thing I can do to help Joe Biden is to pretend I didn't get your text," said a third Democratic lawmaker.

Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.