2008-04-05 A photo is worth a thou.....

I only recently came across this book and it was an especially wonderful find because of the editorial format. To reproduce the photos in the context of their spreads and pages was just right for me as I spent my life as a publication designer. Although it is celebration of the World Press Photo organization another of the book's strengths is the range of material, not just hard news images but feature photography, so Richard Avedon's 1968 psychedelic Beatles shots are here, a Diane Arbus set for Esquire in 1960 or a series of feet photos for Suddeutsche Zeitung, 2004.

Mary Panzer's introduction does a neat job of describing photojournalism from past decades and her captions for each photographer and publication are spot-on. As a designer I was interested to see how current affairs magazines handled photos and mostly they are left alone to tell their story though Paris Match has a habit of putting text on the photo but unfortunately in a rather un-designed way where as Stern do it in a much more considered way.

I thought the book a first class survey of journalism in past decades. A similar book is `Kiosk' (ISBN 9783882437911) by Robert LeBeck. It is a history of the genre from 1839 to 1973 and like `Things as they are' it shows photos as they originally appeared on covers and in the spreads inside.