Hard to pick just five, but here goes:
Before he was Quoom, H-P created the Ornaments of Triumph series. Because of Yahoo's limitations he had to put it on a download site and post a link to the Yahoo Crux group so we could get it. This particular picture struck me as very powerful back then, the first one I'd seen that illustrated the moment when the condemned's feet left the ground for the last time:
Damian was and is an amazing artist, able to composite pieces of pictures seamlessly to make something entirely new and different. In 2005, he and I collaborated on his
Roman Crucifictions book. He sent me pictures, and I wrote stories about what I saw. This one already had tituli for the three girls with Greek inscriptions that I figured out was the Greek word for "witch." So they became "The Three Witches" and I wrote a story with that title which is now here in our archives.
Makar was and I suppose always will be one of the greatest artists with a camera in the crux genre. He was one of the few who realized that a naked woman on a cross wasn't limited to a static pose like a golden crucifix. His models moved and explored the boundaries of their limited range of motion on the cross, in the process teaching the rest of us - certainly me - how a woman's body would twist, writhe and strain on a cross. One of his most memorable models and one who has appeared in innumerable photo manipulations is Alice.
Then there was Yusseby, whose quirky cartoon drawings illustrated what we knew about ancient crucifixion practices and sometimes just caught a common scene such as this one, a pair of rebels crucified by the road, an example and lesson to all who passed by and spared them a glance as they suffered.
Skating Jesus does the best job today of painting gritty realism into his art and incorporating depth-of-field camera techniques in digital rendering.
And finally, my favorite artist is me, because I create what I imagine and want to see, the way I want to see it. One of my most dramatic scenes, in my opinion, is the stripping of Sabina's loincloth just before she is crucified.
Obviously I can't count because that is six, not five.