This is a thrilling, harrowing book. Each picture is worth lingering over.

Jacobson has collected together an extraordinary set of images that shows precisely how the camera can lie, or be made to lie.

The victor?s account of history may be the one that gets written down, but photojournalism still has the power to undermine the official version. Such is the corrective testimony of this startling collection of banned, suppressed or conveniently forgotten potential news images depicting moments from the last century where the propaganda needs of politicians, despots and stars clashed with sometimes awkward, sometimes horrifying truths.

Incorporating images and text from the Index On Censorship and the Hulton Getty Picture Collection, the images represent a reality check on alleged events from the last hundred years, documenting the struggle of the powerful to contend with rival cultural forces of media and information.

In 1900, the British campaign against the Boers in South Africa was being written up as heoric, yet in Underexposed we're confronted with the world's first concentration camps, set up by the British to deal mostly with Boer woman and children. Reclaimed from the trash cans of the Second World War, Hitler's preening speech rehearsals come back to argue with his self-made myth.

From the cruelty of Stalin's Russia to fundamentalist chaos in Iran, via disgruntled starlets, ecological destruction and US nuclear tests, Underexposed gathers some of the most ideologically dangerous photographs ever taken and releases them to haunt the increasingly manipulated, retouched present. With an incisive forward by Colin Jacobson, the book is a seminal work for all those curious about what lies beneath the last century's layers of spin.

This is a hidden history of the 20th century, it is a collection of banned, manipulated or distorted images that explore the extreme influence of photography on modern society. Subjects include: Hitler gesticulating in front of a mirror, British concentration camps in South Africa, the exposed body of the Ayatollah Khomeini at his funeral, bodies of journalists killed during the battle for control of the Duma in Moscow and an Irish fascist salute at a group meeting in County Cork.

2008-03-07 A Magnificent Book - and not just for its Many Stunning Pictures...

With an accompanying/positioning narrative to each picture, this book really does blow the lid on just what we're allowed to see/have been shown in the West - both today and how certain Histories have been 'air-brushed'. A lot of the narratives come from the photographers themselves, so you get a clear idea of what they originally intended their work to portray, and how it was eventually spun by the media who ended up printing them.

It also allows you see what kind pictures do exist on topics which you thought you'd 'seen it all', but reading this book proves you haven't...not by a long chalk.

Well researched, honest commentary and superb pictures (colour & black-n-white). A veritable lexicon of key points in History - most of which you've never seen before.