Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope

by Bruce Bernard, Terence McNamee

A visual history of the 20th century, the photographs in this volume cover events which range from the hard history of politics to new inventions, the arts, society and fashion. The images have been drawn from international agencies such as Life, Magnum, Picture Post and Stern.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Photography, Reference, Art, Art and Photography

1120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This enormous beast of a book, 1,117 pages long, consists of photos of everything that happened between the years 1899 and 1999 – a slight exaggeration, but it sure seems so. Each year is allotted between ten and twenty photos, and although I can’t claim total accuracy here, by my reckoning 78% of all these photos depict human misery in one form or another.

Leafing through this vast book, easily the heaviest out of the thousand or so I have in my possession, I tremble at the accumulation of the clear evidence that I, in my life, have been the recipient of great, undeserved, statistically unlikely, and almost unnoticed, good fortune. I’ve been so fantastically lucky. Why me? I was born well after all the great wars, in a country which had given up its empire and had no need to conscript its young men. My country had already created a cradle-to-grave welfare state – the great dreams of the socialists were everyday reality for me : free universal schooling (up to and including university – no student fees or loans for me), free (at the point of delivery) universal health care; a police force which is not allowed to arrest me arbitrarily, and one which is relatively free of corruption; a military which does not interfere with the democratic process; shops which refund goods! Insurance companies which pay up promptly! Streets paved! Electricity which never shuts off! Clean water! Almost no guns! Very few murders! Elections free and fair and no vote-rigging! Plentiful libraries! Even my job is (touch wood) secure (I think the clinical trial business is here to stay).

I have lived through all of this and taken it for granted – this is my country, this is my life, in other places things were different, I always knew that. But really, for 99.9% of all the human beings who have ever got themselves born on this spinning planet in this backwater of a minor galaxy out on the rim of what we consider to be the universe, it hasn’t been like that at all. No, not at all. These photos show what it has been like which is the opposite of the above list – revolution, massacre, assassination, drought, disease, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse clattering about the school playground.

I can’t say I recommend this extraordinary catalogue of how human beings can fuck up each other so brilliantly well there ought to be a medal for it, but if you want a visceral violent fast-acting no-punches-pulled photographic history of the psychopathic 20th century, this is it. You will be devastated.

Note : If you buy it from a shop you will need a strong friend with you.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brick of a book. Use as a doorstop or put it on display. It is stylish on high shelves. This is one to read over and over. By read, I mean look at. This is a picture book for grownups. Over 1200 pages of photographs (black and white as well as color) bring to life the best and worst images on record for each year from 1899 to 1999. Heavy in literal weight and in content, wars feature in all their brutality. But, so do Laurel and Hardy, Twiggy, and a kiss between two lovers wrapped in the British flag on the night Hong Kong was handed back to China.

Not, absolutely not, a book to leave out where there are small children. Later, though, it could teach them a lot. The commentary displays a bias at times, but like the photographs it is only human.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This huge book (over 1,200 pages) contains a wealth of photographs covering 100 years of events that shaped the world we live in. It's not the most cheerful book, as a large percentage of it is made up of war photographs, but it's an epic undertaking and a fascinating look at history.

[Don ツ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some say a picture worth a thousand words. This is a great book, a book truer than the event itself.

All I can say is this book is full of war...war...war...
From the world war I until world war II and continues afterwards, Bosnian civil war, the cold war, ...
History never fail to repeat itself.

You'll be amazed to see all the historical pictures from all over the world mostly of from the previous century . 1899 until 1999. Cool facts that is unknown to others. Like Fidelio was the only opera Beethoven ever compose. To see the Boxer Rising of Japanese in China, where the human head cutted off bizarrely, suicide, killings,Nazi's execution.There is this one guerilla army proudly smile looking at a head while the other was holding it --almost bring me nightmares.--

What attracts me the most is the pictures of arabs, especially the issue between Palestine and Israel. There are also happy pictures once for a while. Such Marilyn Monroe, World Cup, beauty pageant but it was devastating to know that in other part of the world, at the same time , had been war and disaster. I feel remorseful in a way that I flipped onto another picture of dead bodies.

The most gigantic book I've ever read. Sure. It's all pictures and of course there are few writings here and there. I mean what are pictures without words, right?

ps:Bruce Bernard, the photo editor for this book died in 2000.

ps: I was rushing to end this book, as I will not able to devour it anymore next time. It was really great book. Not only the pictures but also the writings.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 5 out of 5]

This photograph book is nothing short of incredible. After Taschen, Phaidon is my favorite edition of art and photography books.

This book gives a visual report of political and cultural highlights around the world from 1899 to 1999.

Many, for me, unseen before photographs, full page, both black and white and color, show life before, during, and after the World Wars, Korean, Vietnam, leaders elected and deposed on every continent and if you count the Falkland Islands, even Antarctica.

Many are dramatic, even gruesome. A couple I wish I had not seen, even though they are a legitimate part of the deplorable side of our history exposing man's inhumanity to man.

In addition to the photos, there is a time line with a paragraph describing the events surrounding each photograph. These are a couple of pages long and are after every ten years of photographs.

At four inches thick and ten by ten inches long and wide, this book could double as a foot stool and it if worth every inch.

[Rob]

thickest book ever. 15 pounds. 1000 amazing photographs, each with a pithy caption and a few sentences of historical background. i look at it when i go to the library.

[David Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope edited by Bruce Bernard (Phaidon Press 1999) (909.82) (3769).

This is one of the last book reviews of a big stack of photographic collections that I purchased from my local used book store in 2022.

This is not the prettiest or the most engaging of the ten-or-so volumes I took home, but it is by far the most thorough, the most far-reaching, and the most massive. It is a brick of a book. It features over 1100 pages of selected photos printed on thick card stock and bound in a hardback format. It weighs in at a hefty 14 pounds, which makes it a little hard to balance on one’s lap.

This volume’s focus is on historical events rather than on celebrities or art.

The photos are almost exclusively black and white images of many of the major events that occurred between 1900 and 2000. The publisher Phaidon Press is based in London and New York; this collection bears a distinctly British imprint, with many of the selected images’ historical significance having been informed by a distinctly British point of view (e.g. images of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, of South Africa and the Boers, and of the collapse of the far-flung British Empire).

I purchased a used HB copy in very good condition for $0.25 from McKay’s Books on 6/1/22.

My rating: 7.25/10, finished 4/14/23 (3769).

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born"
Bob Dylan 1962
In 1999 this book was everywhere for sale: book stores, department stores, boutiques.
Not so much as a collection of photographs but as a memento of the time and place.
For those not freaked out by Y2K, it had a style and heft about it that implied that here was a statement. One worthwhile and browseable well into the future.
Would that it had been better curated. Although presented chronologically (and that, captionwise, its saving grace), the attempt to include a bit of everything necessitates a scattershot approach that ignores themes in favor of a shear mass of images. By definition war and chaos predominate.
And some of the images are downright odd: a still of Gregory Peck lashed to the mast as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick; out of focus shots, just because. What it reminds me of is the old encyclopedia yearbook annual volumes. At least those were alphabetical by subject. Still and all it is a mass. A mess. Just like the age it purports to represent.

[Guillermo Galvan]

Best photography collection I've seen.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

CENTURY is a 1112 page book with the most gripping images of the last century with about three pages of more detailed writing about each image after every 100-200 pictures.
I think it has acheived everything the author had intended it to.