Eugène Atget (b.12Feb1857 – d.04August1927) was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization.
His father, carriage builder Jean-Eugène Atget, died in 1862, and his mother, Clara-Adeline Atget née Hourlier died shortly after; he was an orphan at age seven. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux and after finishing secondary education joined the merchant navy.

Atget moved to Paris in 1878. He failed the entrance exam for acting class but was admitted when he had a second try. Because he was drafted for military service he could attend class only part-time, and he was expelled from drama school.
Still living in Paris, he became an actor with a travelling group, performing in the Paris suburbs and the provinces. He met actress Valentine Delafosse Compagnon, who became his companion until her death. He gave up acting because of an infection of his vocal cords in 1887, moved to the provinces and took up painting without success. When he was thirty he made his first photographs, of Amiens and Beauvais, which date from 1888.

Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death.[2] Though he sold his work to artists and craftspeople, and became an inspiration for the surrealists, he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive..
Henri Cartier-Bresson was much inspired by his photography.
[Wikipedia]

Henri Cartier-Bresson (b.22Aug1908 – d.03Aug2004) was a French humanist photographer, considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film.
He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (a.k.a. 'HCB') was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne in France; he was the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer.
The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. His parents supported him financially so Henri could pursue photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.

Young Henri took holiday snapshots with a Box Brownie; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera.
A governess called 'Miss Kitty', who came from across the Channel, instilled in him the love of - and competence in - the English language.
After trying to learn music, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter. But the painting lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed in World War I.
In 1927 Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote.
HCB also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques Émile Blanche. During this period, he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art.
Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera."

In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe, but each had a different view on the direction photography should take.
Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere. But, although he knew the concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings.

From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson studied art, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where he became bilingual.
In 1930 he was conscripted into the French Army and stationed at Le Bourget near Paris.
HCB met American expatriate Harry Crosby at Le Bourget. The two men both had an interest in photography, and Harry presented Henri with his first camera. They spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil (The Sun Mill), near Paris in Ermenonville, France.
Continued below..->

Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi.

He acquired the Leica camera, with 50 mm lens, in Marseilles that would accompany him for many years.
The anonymity that the small camera gave him in a crowd or during an intimate moment was essential in overcoming the formal and unnatural behavior of those who were aware of being photographed. He enhanced his anonymity by painting all shiny parts of the Leica with black paint.
[Wikipedia, more..]

Shōmei Tōmatsu (b.16Jan1930 – d.14Dec2012) was a Japanese photographer. He is known primarily for his images that depict the impact of World War II on Japan and the subsequent occupation of U.S. forces.
As one of the leading postwar photographers, Tōmatsu is attributed with influencing the younger generations of photographers including those associated with the magazine 'Provoke' (Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama).

Tōmatsu was born in Nagoya in 1930. As an adolescent during World War II, he was mobilized to support Japan's war effort. Like many Japanese students his age, he was sent to work at a steel factory and underwent incessant conditioning intended to instill fear and hatred towards the British and Americans.
After WW2 Tōmatsu interacted with Americans firsthand and found that his preconceptions of them were not entirely salient. At the time Tōmatsu's contempt for the violence and crimes committed by these soldiers was complicated by individual acts of kindness he received from them.

Tōmatsu embraced photography while an economics student at Aichi University. While still in university, his photographs were shown frequently in monthly amateur competitions by Camera magazine.
Towards the end of the 1950s, Tōmatsu began photographing Japanese towns with major American bases, a project that would span over 10 years.
Tōmatsu's artistic output and renown grew significantly during the 1960s, exemplified by his prolific engagements with many prominent Japanese photography magazines.
In contrast to his earlier style which resembled traditional photojournalism, Tōmatsu was beginning to develop a highly expressionistic form of image taking that emphasized the photographer's own subjectivity.
He rejected the claim that he was ever a photojournalist, and admonished journalistic thinking as an impediment to photography.
[Wikipedia, more..]