Things As They Are.

Photojournalism in Context Since 1955.

Numerous contributing photographers. Afterword by Christian Caujolle. Introduction by Mary Panzer. Preface by Michiel Munneke.

Aperture, New York, 2006. 384 pp., 500 color illustrations, 9x11¾".

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, Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtwey, Annie Leibovitz, 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.
News pictures may be worth a thousand words, but what are those words, and how do we know without a caption? The practice of photojournalism is as old as the invention of the wet-plate process, and the arguments over the meaning of photojournalistic images probably started about the time that the first negatives of breaking events were developed. Compounding the problem is the confusion of the factual impulse with the artistic ambitions of many photojournalists, starting (perhaps) with Cartier-Bresson, Renger-Patzsch and Kertész. Things As They Are is an attempt to understand the ways that photojournalism has changed, and changed our minds, over the last fifty years. Though the book starts with a brief history of the dawn of illustrated magazines, the bulk of the material is devoted to the Golden Age of institutions like Life, Look, the (London) Sunday Times Magazine, Stern and many others. The real value of this wide-ranging survey is the way the images are presented. Original magazine layouts from the 1950s to the early 2000s give us a sense of the complex crossover that took place between art, commerce and a sense of public service. Many of the pictures are familiar, but knowing how decisions were made in the layout process aids our understanding of our own assumptions and associations. Picture magazines have declined to niche vehicles in the face of television, media consolidation/conservatism and the advent of online publishing. But in their heyday, the magazines were the record of what was going on in the world; they gave a mass audience a sense of participating in history as it happened. The talent, variety and dedication displayed by the photographers are breathtaking, and the dash and daring of the editors and designers are inspiring. One can’t help wondering if we’ll ever see a mass audience arise again with enough in common to support such a creative outburst. PHIL HARRIS

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