“Before White was able to become a full-time artist and teacher, he worked for nearly a decade in Newark, Ohio, balancing a bookkeeping job with his avocation as a photographer. Featured in the third issue of Camera Work, White received international recognition for his work…In 1906 he moved to New York and assisted Alfred Stieglitz in the operation of his newly opened gallery.”
FROM http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=6761

“When White first began teaching, the medium of photography was coming into its own as a means of artistic expression, and its advantages for communication had been acknowledged. Photographs were preferred over wood engravings and often over drawings for illustration in newspapers and magazines. The use of photographs in advertisements was on the rise. But no place existed for people to learn how to use the camera in the art of seeing.

Charismatic amateur photographer and teacher Clarence H. White was inspired to found a school that would advocate applying art principles to professional and commercial as well as art photography.”
FROM http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0112/white.html

Clarence H. White: https://media.artic.edu/stieglitz/clarence-h-white/
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Hudson_White

The audience for Steichen’s early photographs—readers of Camera Work, visitors to 291, and members of amateur camera clubs—were important within artistic circles, but their number was small compared to the audience he would address following the war. Indeed, Steichen’s large and painterly early prints, perhaps because of their rarity, are now far less known by the general public than his portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities that appeared in Condé Nast’s Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s, or his fashion and advertising photographs that shared those same pages. Moreover, while the circulation of Camera Work never topped a thousand (and was often much less) and its intended audience was an intellectual elite, the Condé Nast publications catered to a much larger and broader readership, one hungry for just the sort of glamorous celebrity portraiture at which Steichen excelled.
FROM http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stei/hd_stei.htm

Edward Steichen photos from the International Center of Photography:
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/edward-steichen?all/all/all/all/0

After moving back to California in 1926, Weston began his work for which he is most deservedly famous: natural forms, close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. Between 1927 and 1930, Weston made a series of monumental close-ups of seashells, peppers, and halved cabbages, bringing out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms. Weston moved to Carmel, California in 1929 and shot the first of many photographs of rocks and trees at Point Lobos, California. Weston became one of the founding members of Group f/64 in 1932 with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Sonya Noskowiak. The group chose this optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. 1936 marked the start of Weston’s series of nudes and sand dunes in Oceano, California, which are often considered some of his finest work. Weston became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental work in 1936.

FROM https://www.edward-weston.com/edwardweston