PHOTO ICONS: 50 Landmark Photographs and Their Stories

36 photographers are featured, chapters on each arranged chronologically with a brief biography, and includes Maurice Guibert (photographing Toulouse-Lautrec in 1894), Man Ray's Noire et Blanche images of 1926 and Robert Mapplethorpe's Lisa Lyon cycle of the 1980s. A beautiful book, faithfully reproducing the iconic images plus some additional variations rarely published before. Photographs have a strange and powerful way of shaping the way we see the world, entering our collective consciousness, defining eras, making history, or simply touching something so fundamentally human and universal that they have become resonant icons all over the globe. From some of the earliest photography, such as Nicéphore Niépce's 1827 eight-hour-exposure rooftop picture and Louis Daguerre's famous 1838 street scene, through to Martin Parr, this is as much a history of the medium as a case-by-case analysis of its social, historical, and artistic impact. We take in experimental Surrealist shots of the 1920s and the gritty photorealism of the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. We witness the power-makers (Che Guevara) and the heartbreakers (Marilyn Monroe) as well as the great gamut of human emotions and experiences to which photography bears such vivid witness: from the euphoric Kiss in Front of City Hall (1950) by Doisneau to the horror of Nick Ut's Napalm Against Civilians showing nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked toward the camera from South Vietnamese napalm. Colour photos, 14 x 19.5 cm, 432 pages. New from Taschen.
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