Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955
When the World Press Photo organization wanted to issue a commemorative volume that would dynamically trace developments in the last half-century of photojournalism, they had a very good idea: instead of presenting just a selection of memorable images, they would also reproduce the context—the actual pages of newspapers and magazines—in which the images first appeared. The result is a resounding technical success; the volume is big enough to clearly reproduce a variety of formats while remaining comfortable to look through. The book is also exceptionally well edited, with spare but helpful texts, an intelligent mix of the familiar (Salgado's 1987 series of Brazilian miners for theLondon Sunday Times) and fairly obscure (Donna Ferrato's powerfulPhiladelphia Inquirerseries on domestic violence from the same year). Serious topics rub shoulders with comparatively lighthearted but era-defining sequences, like Helmut Newton's 1979 shoot in Berlin for the German edition ofVogueand Martin Parr's "Sun Kitsch" spread forWin 1997. The original layouts are highly evocative in themselves, and the reduced format intensifies their graphic power. This book is compulsive reading for anyone interested in how photographers have witnessed history and how their images have entered it.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.