Who made the list and who didn't?

Read more to find out.

5. Ansel Adams's Nevada Fall, Rainbow Let's get this straight: Ansel Adams was a rad shutterbug, not the deity that mall poster shops and wannabe nature photographers have made him out to be. The underrated things about the man include the creation of the zone system, his color slides and the establishment of the largest photo archive in North America...and not this shot that was taken around 1947. A beautifully crafted image indeed, but in no way the be-all and end-all.

4. Richard Avedon's Marilyn Monroe This 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe is good, but is it $231,000 good? That's the price it sold for in 2010, six years after the fashion photographer's death, at Christie's. It's probably the mystique that surrounds Monroe that makes this one so revered, but Avedon had a lot more impressive silver gelatins -- Sly Stone and his "America West" series, just to name a few -- in his back pocket.

3. Iain Macmillan's cover shot for The Beatles' Abbey Road Avedon had a prized shot of The Beatles in his portfolio, but Macmillan's image is more known because his photograph is plastered on the jacket of the group's beloved 1969 LP. It's cool and easily identifiable, but is four blokes sashaying in a crosswalk that awesome of a composition? Plus, get this: The idea wasn't even sketched out by Macmillan -- that credit apparently goes to Paul McCartney.

If you like this story, consider signing up for our email newsletters.

SHOW ME HOW

X

Newsletters

_{All-access pass to the top stories, events and offers around town.}

• No Thanks
• Sign Up

X

SUCCESS!

You have successfully signed up for your selected newsletter(s) - please keep an eye on your mailbox, we're movin' in!

2. Joel-Peter Witkin's Feast of Fools Most modern-day occultists tend to name-drop the documenter of disassembled corpses, body parts (see the above image from 1990) and outsider folks like dwarves and hermaphrodites. Though his fine-art choices do tend to stick with the viewer, his shtick is a bit played out -- some might even say that he's Diane Arbus 3.0 or lower.

1. Andreas Gursky's Rhein II We've said it before and we'll say it again: Someone paid $4.3 million for some bland sky, patches of whatever grass and a river that doesn't look to be all that clean. We either don't get it or we're not art-snob enough.