Overview
Description: Things as They Are presents the story of photojournalism over the past five decades, from 1955 until today. Published in collaboration with World Press Photo on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the book takes us from the golden era of the illustrated press--the heyday of Life magazine and Picture Post, and the moment of The Museum of Modern Art's defining Family of Man exhibition--to the twenty-first century's explosion of digital media. This history is told through the presentation of 125 photojournalistic features shot and published around the world, shown in context on the pages of newspapers and magazines as the public originally experienced them. In this way, Things as They Are reveals how the events of the world, the art of photographers and the interests of publishers and the press converged on the printed page. It traces how photojournalism has developed over time alongside changing technology, media, fashions in photography, and a changing world. And it does so using landmark photo-essays from some of the greatest photographers in the world, including W. Eugene Smith, Sebastiao Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtwey, Annie Liebovitz, Nan Goldin and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Each project is accompanied by expert commentary. An international panel of 100 specialists--photographers, editors, art directors, historians and magazine collectors--made the final selections. They chose stories that exemplified the highest quality of work published internationally during each period, stories that demonstrated important innovations in photography and in publishing, and stories that played a key role in shaping the history of photojournalism itself.Synopsis
Afterword by Christian Caujolle. Introduction by Mary Panzer. Preface by Michiel Munneke.
Publishers Weekly
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 the London Sunday Times) and fairly obscure (Donna Ferrato's powerful Philadelphia Inquirer series 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 of Vogue and Martin Parr's "Sun Kitsch" spread for W in 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 2006 Reed Business Information.