Blake Little is an award-winning Los Angeles–based photographer whose career spans forty-six years, distinguished by the parallel development of his fine art practice and his commercial and editorial photography. Throughout his career, these two bodies of work have informed one another, resulting in a distinctive photographic vision. His photographs are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Eiteljorg Museum, and other collections. His work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, including recent exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Los Angeles, New York, and Palm Springs.

In addition to publishing eight monographs, Little has photographed many of the world's leading artists, actors, musicians, and cultural figures for editorial and commercial clients. In 2026, eight photographs from three series were acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum, recognizing more than four decades of a fine art practice that has remained at the center of his photographic career. Little currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where the desert landscape has become an important source of inspiration for several new photographic series.

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Little studied at the University of Washington and Seattle Central College, where he completed his photography degree in 1981. After moving to Los Angeles, he became part of the city's vibrant art scene, photographing artists including David Hockney, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and many others. He later taught photography at ArtCenter College of Design while building parallel careers in fine art and editorial portraiture.

Little's editorial and commercial career includes portraits of Tom Cruise, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Steve Carell, Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Marcia Cross, Colin Powell, Lou Reed, k.d. lang, 50 Cent, Glenn Close, Mike Myers, Jane Fonda, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Maya Rudolph, Dwayne Johnson, and many others. His clients include Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Virgin Atlantic. In 1985, American Photo named him Best New Portrait Photographer of the Year, launching an editorial career that led to assignments for The New York Times Magazine, The Times Magazine (London), Entertainment Weekly, The Advocate, People, Time, Los Angeles Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and numerous other publications.

Little's fine art practice has resulted in eight monographs: Dichotomy (1997), The Company of Men (2011), Manifest (2013), Preservation (2015), Photographs from the Gay Rodeo (2016), Work (2017), Primary (2022), and Construction Nudes 1981–1985 (2025).

In 2012, Little received a grant from the Canadian Rural Development Organization to photograph contemporary western culture in Alberta, Canada. The resulting project, New West, traveled throughout western Canada from 2012 through 2019.

His museum exhibition Blake Little: Photographs from the Gay Rodeo 1988–1992 premiered at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis in 2014 and toured for more than five years to the Rapid City Art Center, Gilcrease Museum, University of Missouri Art Museum, San Diego State University Art Museum, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, and other institutions.

Little's Preservation series received international recognition following its sold-out exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The accompanying video attracted more than five million views online, while photographs from the series received honors from American Photography and the International Photography Awards.

His series Concealed: Portraits of LGBT Gun Owners received an American Photography AP34 award in 2018, followed by the Special Projects Award and Audience Choice Award at the International Pride Photo Awards in Amsterdam in 2019 and the LensCulture Critics' Choice Award in 2021.

In 2020, Fluid, documenting members of the transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid community, opened at the University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries before traveling to the Kenderdine Art Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan. Photographs from the series were published in Public 62: The Gender Diverse Lens.

Little published Primary in 2022, his seventh monograph, which sold out within one year. In 2023, Monterey Marketplace Mall from his landscape series Coachella Valley Anthropogenic received an American Photography award. In 2024, Golden Years: Portraits of the Mature Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Community received both an American Photography AP40 award and a Px3 Prix de la Photographie Paris award, while Coachella Valley Anthropogenic received an International Photography Award.

His eighth monograph, Construction Nudes 1981–1985, was published in early 2025 and was featured in a solo exhibition at Jaco Moretti Arts in Palm Springs. That same year, Preservation was included in the Yeast Photo Festival in Puglia, Italy. In 2026, three photographs from Preservation were exhibited in Honey for Art and Society at the Museum Brot und Kunst in Ulm, Germany, alongside works by Joseph Beuys, Heidi Buhl, and Felix Droese.

In 2026, curator Paul Martineau selected eight photographs from three bodies of work for the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum: four photographs from Construction Nudes (1981–1985) were acquired by purchase, while two photographs from Dichotomy (1997) and two photographs from Photographs from the Gay Rodeo were donated to the museum. The acquisition represents a significant milestone in Little's career and affirms a photographic practice developed over more than four decades.