The Five Women Photographers Everyone Should Be Talking About
This article features five photographers whose careers have been built through consistency, intention, and a willingness to stay close to their subjects. Their work spans remote landscapes, studio sets, long-term documentary projects, and carefully constructed narrative scenes. Yet, each of them approaches photography as a practice that requires time, preparation, and presence. Whether working outdoors for weeks at a time or refining a single image through planning and collaboration, they share a respect for the process and for the environments and people they photograph.
Elizabeth Gadd works almost entirely within the landscapes she moves through, often after days of hiking and camping while waiting for the right conditions. Her photographs are shot on location and rely on patience and physical effort rather than digital manipulation. Cristina Mittermeier brings decades of experience to her practice, combining a background in marine biology with a long photography career focused on the relationships among people, wildlife, and the health of the planet. Petra Collins draws from adolescence, internet culture, and staged storytelling, creating images that examine girlhood, performance, and control across photography, books, and film. Lindsay Adler is known for her sharp, controlled approach to fashion and beauty photography, as well as for her role as an educator who has influenced how many photographers learn lighting, planning, and visual problem-solving. Ami Vitale works through long-term immersion, often returning to the same places and communities over years to document conflict, conservation, and coexistence.
While their subjects and working methods differ, these photographers are united by their deliberate approach to their work. Each image comes from showing up, paying attention, and staying long enough for something meaningful to take shape. From mountain lakes and polar regions to studios and remote villages, their photographs carry a clear sense of care, responsibility, and purpose, shaped by years spent learning how to work thoughtfully with a camera.
Elizabeth Gadd @https://www.instagram.com/elizabethgadd/
Elizabeth Gadd is a photographer whose work is inseparable from the landscapes she moves through in her life. Originally from British Columbia and currently based in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, her days are shaped by trails, weather shifts, and long stretches of time spent outdoors. Mountains, forests, open fields, and water appear throughout her photographs not as scenery, but as places she inhabits fully, often after days or weeks of hiking and camping while waiting for the right conditions to unfold.
Her relationship with photography began early, sparked by a childhood love of animals and wilderness and a borrowed camera from her father. As a teenager, she committed to a year-long self-portrait project, using the challenge to learn quickly and step into unfamiliar territory. She expected the project to mark an ending, but a final image made alone in a frozen mountain lake revealed something else entirely. In that quiet moment, Elizabeth realised she wanted to continue exploring what it meant to be present within the landscape, rather than standing apart from it.
More than fifteen years later, Elizabeth Gadd still combines self-portraiture with real locations, never relying on composites or artificial alterations. Each photograph is shaped by patience, physical effort, and a willingness to wait. Her images convey a sense of calm and solitude, offering viewers space to pause and settle into the scene. When she is not hiking, camping, or travelling, she can often be found at home with her dog Pepper, reading fantasy novels and enjoying more than a bit of chocolate, before setting out once again toward the mountains.
Cristina Mittermeier@https://www.instagram.com/mitty/
Cristina “Mitty” Mittermeier has spent more than three decades shaping a photographic career rooted in curiosity, care, and a lifelong bond with the natural world. Trained as a marine biologist before turning fully to photography, she brings a scientist’s understanding and a storyteller’s instinct to everything she creates. Her images often sit at the meeting point of people, wildlife, and place, revealing how closely our lives are tied to the health of the planet.
Over the years, her work has found its way into significant public and private collections worldwide, guided by long-standing relationships with respected curators and art dealers. Recognition has followed naturally. In 2024, her photographic work on The Last Ice, a film by Dr Enric Sala focusing on Inuit sovereignty and climate change in the Arctic, earned her a National News and Documentary Emmy Award as part of the National Geographic Explorers team. The following year, she received a second Emmy, alongside her husband and longtime collaborator, Paul Nicklen, for the documentary Photographer, directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.
In 2025, Mittermeier was named Artist of the Year by Intersect Art and Design Fair in Aspen, adding to a long list of honours that includes the Smithsonian Conservation Photographer of the Year Award, the Sylvia Earle Medal, Travel and Leisure’s Global Vision Award, and the Wings Women of Discovery award. She has twice been recognised among the 100 Latinos Most Dedicated to Climate Action and has been named one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year. As a Sony Artisan of Imagery and a Rolex Perpetual Planet Explorer, she continues to work at a scale that extends far beyond the frame, using photography to foster care for places and cultures often overlooked.
What sets Cristina Mittermeier apart is not just the scope of her career, but the consistency of her purpose. Whether working in polar regions, coastal waters, or remote communities, her photographs carry a sense of responsibility and respect that comes from decades spent listening, learning, and showing up for the natural world she has dedicated her life to sharing.
Petra Collins@https://www.instagram.com/petrafcollins/
Petra Collins began taking photographs as a teenager, and that early start shaped a body of work that would go on to influence the visual language of an entire decade. Since picking up a camera at fifteen, she has built a practice that moves fluidly between photography, fashion, film, and music, often circling back to the experience of growing up as a young woman in a world shaped by the internet, fantasy, and constant self-surveillance.
Her images often feel diaristic without being literal, drawing from moments of adolescence, desire, discomfort, and transformation. Collins is known for creating spaces where softness and unease sit side by side, and where girlhood is shown as layered, complicated, and self-aware. This approach has carried through her books, beginning with Coming of Age and continuing through titles such as OMG, I’m Being Killed and Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is?, where she first began experimenting with self-portraiture and questions of the body, identity, and control.
In 2021, Collins released Fairytales with Rizzoli, a collaborative project with Alexa Demie that reimagines classic folklore through contemporary characters and settings. Shot across suburban interiors, parking lots, and constructed fantasy spaces, the book blends myth with modern life, using costume, prosthetics, and performance to tell new stories that feel both playful and unsettling.Alongside her publishing work, Collins has exhibited widely, with solo shows at institutions and fairs including the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto and Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as curated projects at MoMA and exhibitions across New York, Paris, Milan, and Oslo. As she continues to expand into filmmaking with her narrative feature debut, Petra Collins remains a defining voice of her generation, shaping imagery that captures how it feels to grow, perform, and exist under the constant gaze of contemporary culture.
Lindsay Adler@https://www.instagram.com/lindsayadler_photo
Lindsay Adler is a photographer, director, and educator whose career has been shaped by curiosity, precision, and a clear love for problem solving through images. Based in New York, she works primarily in beauty and fashion, traveling widely to shoot for leading brands and major editorial publications. Her photographs are immediately recognizable for their clarity and graphic confidence, built through careful planning and close collaboration with the teams around her.
Alongside her commercial work, Lindsay has become one of the most influential voices in photography education today. She has written five books, including a title recognized by Amazon as one of the Best Books of 2011 in Arts and Photography, and she continues to publish resources that photographers return to again and again. Whether teaching through platforms like CreativeLive and KelbyOne or speaking at events around the world, she has reached tens of thousands of students eager to learn not just how to shoot, but how to think through an image.
In 2020, Lindsay made history as the first woman to receive the Rangefinder Icon of the Year Award, a milestone that reflects both her impact behind the camera and her leadership within the industry. With a large and engaged online following and millions of views across her educational content, she bridges the worlds of working professional and mentor with ease. For clients, collaborators, and students alike, Lindsay Adler brings a rare combination of technical command, clear communication, and generosity with knowledge, making her a defining figure in contemporary photography.
Ami Vitale@https://www.instagram.com/amivitale
Ami Vitale has built a career by showing up fully and staying long enough to understand the places and people she photographs. As a National Geographic Magazine photographer and Nikon Ambassador, she has worked in more than one hundred countries, often in challenging conditions, documenting conflict, conservation, and the fragile relationship between humans and the natural world. Her approach has always been grounded in immersion, guided by her belief in living the story rather than observing it from a distance.
Early in her career, Vitale covered war and unrest, spending extended periods in regions shaped by violence and instability. A turning point came in 2009 while documenting the transport and release of one of the last northern white rhinos, an experience that redirected her focus toward wildlife, conservation, and the communities working to protect endangered species. Since then, her work has centered on long-term stories that reveal care, responsibility, and coexistence, including her award-winning National Geographic feature on a Kenyan community safeguarding elephants.
Vitale’s photographs have been recognized with some of the most respected honors in photojournalism, including multiple World Press Photo awards, Magazine Photographer of the Year from both the National Press Photographers Association and the International Photographer of the Year competition, and the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting. Her storytelling has also reached wider audiences through documentary series for National Geographic and the publication of her best-selling book Panda Love, which offers a rare look into the lives of giant pandas.
Now based in Montana, Ami Vitale continues to photograph for National Geographic while sharing her experience through lectures, workshops, and educational programs around the world. As a founding member of Ripple Effect Images and a member of the Alexia Foundation’s Photojournalism Advisory Council, she remains committed to using photography as a way to inform, connect, and support communities whose stories are too often overlooked.
By the end of this feature, it is clear that each of these photographers has built a career through steady commitment rather than quick visibility. Their work comes from time spent learning environments, understanding people, and accepting that some images take longer than expected. Whether that means returning to the same location season after season or refining a concept through careful planning, they allow the process to lead the outcome.
What connects their work is a shared sense of responsibility toward the places and subjects they photograph. They approach each assignment or long-term project with attention and restraint, aware of how images circulate and what they carry. In an industry that often rewards speed, their careers show the value of slowing down, staying present, and letting experience shape the work over time.
