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150 Years of Photojournalism Volume 1
Used. Very Good conditions. May have soft reading marks and name of the previous owner.
896 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 10, 2019
Libro che sembrerebbe interessante ma le foto non sono sempre all'altezza e soprattutto non viene mai menzionato il nome dei fotografi nei credits delle immagini, il che mi pare una scelta discutibile per un libro che dovrebbe parlare di fotogiornalismo.
July 16, 2013
I approached this book with high expectations but as I progressed through the book, I was soon disillusioned.
First of all, the title of this book is misleading. It is really just a light-weight pictorial history book and not a history of photojournalism. The photographers are hardly mentioned and the photography itself is not discussed or analyzed at all. Also, many of the photos are staged, posed or shot in studios, which does not really count as photojournalism. Thankfully there are also lots of unposed on-location shots from years past, which do satisfy the curiousity of those wishing to see what life was like back then.
Another problem is the captions written by the author. They just don't do justice to most of the photos and it seems like the author just riffed off the pictures when writing the captions. A huge omission is the lack of actual details about the photos. We almost never learn where, when or by whom any given picture was taken. Instead we get general descriptions of the times, which are only loosely connected with each individual picture. I understand that for pictures this old, much of the information may have been lost, but even an "Author unknown, taken around 1880-1890 somewhere in Southern England" is vastly preferable to general chit-chat with no actual details. Also the way the captions are written - with references to pictures jumping all over the place - are quite tedious to read. Instead of writing something under each picture, there is just one paragraph of text with references to pictures on the page in random order. Each time a picture is referenced, you'll have to go hunting on the page in order to find it.
However, since the book is about the pictures and not the captions, lets take a look at the photos. If you like old photos in general, you will like the photos in this book as well. Many of them reveal a world gone by, with people no longer in existence, and as such, are worthy of deep study and contemplation. The picture quality varies, with many pictures being large and detailed, yet others being too small to appreciate any details. The generally remarkable thing about pictures from over a century ago is the sombre and sobering fact that every single person in every single picture no longer exists. In other words - down to the smallest children, they are all dead by now. Interestingly you probably never think about it when looking at paintings or sculptures of people past. That's probably because those works of art are just approximations of those people and thus somewhat removed from each individual person, whereas a photo is the actual depiction of a person and that makes it much more real.
Since photojournalism is just as much about the common people as it is about the luminaries of the day, for many of the people in those pictures it may be the only proof that they ever even existed. Dozens, hundreds of life stories, lost forever and recorded nowhere, yet they happened to be in the right place at the right time and so their physical appearance is immortalized forever in a photo, even if otherwise they will remain anonymous to us. You can only hope that they continued to lead fulfilling and happy lives after the photos were taken (though for many it is unlikely due to the turbulent times of those days).
All in all, for anyone interested in anthropology, history or old photos, this book may be of mild interest but for anyone actually looking for more information about the history of photojournalism, this book unfortunately doesn't deliver. A nice photo-history of the times since photography began (around the 1850s) until the end of WWI in 1918, but not much else.
First of all, the title of this book is misleading. It is really just a light-weight pictorial history book and not a history of photojournalism. The photographers are hardly mentioned and the photography itself is not discussed or analyzed at all. Also, many of the photos are staged, posed or shot in studios, which does not really count as photojournalism. Thankfully there are also lots of unposed on-location shots from years past, which do satisfy the curiousity of those wishing to see what life was like back then.
Another problem is the captions written by the author. They just don't do justice to most of the photos and it seems like the author just riffed off the pictures when writing the captions. A huge omission is the lack of actual details about the photos. We almost never learn where, when or by whom any given picture was taken. Instead we get general descriptions of the times, which are only loosely connected with each individual picture. I understand that for pictures this old, much of the information may have been lost, but even an "Author unknown, taken around 1880-1890 somewhere in Southern England" is vastly preferable to general chit-chat with no actual details. Also the way the captions are written - with references to pictures jumping all over the place - are quite tedious to read. Instead of writing something under each picture, there is just one paragraph of text with references to pictures on the page in random order. Each time a picture is referenced, you'll have to go hunting on the page in order to find it.
However, since the book is about the pictures and not the captions, lets take a look at the photos. If you like old photos in general, you will like the photos in this book as well. Many of them reveal a world gone by, with people no longer in existence, and as such, are worthy of deep study and contemplation. The picture quality varies, with many pictures being large and detailed, yet others being too small to appreciate any details. The generally remarkable thing about pictures from over a century ago is the sombre and sobering fact that every single person in every single picture no longer exists. In other words - down to the smallest children, they are all dead by now. Interestingly you probably never think about it when looking at paintings or sculptures of people past. That's probably because those works of art are just approximations of those people and thus somewhat removed from each individual person, whereas a photo is the actual depiction of a person and that makes it much more real.
Since photojournalism is just as much about the common people as it is about the luminaries of the day, for many of the people in those pictures it may be the only proof that they ever even existed. Dozens, hundreds of life stories, lost forever and recorded nowhere, yet they happened to be in the right place at the right time and so their physical appearance is immortalized forever in a photo, even if otherwise they will remain anonymous to us. You can only hope that they continued to lead fulfilling and happy lives after the photos were taken (though for many it is unlikely due to the turbulent times of those days).
All in all, for anyone interested in anthropology, history or old photos, this book may be of mild interest but for anyone actually looking for more information about the history of photojournalism, this book unfortunately doesn't deliver. A nice photo-history of the times since photography began (around the 1850s) until the end of WWI in 1918, but not much else.
May 20, 2015
Amazing photographs and interesting captions. I have been working my way through it for months, savoring every page!An incredible historical record.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews