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Summary
Summary
From the first flight of the Wright brothers to the Normandy landing to Woodstock to the Gulf War, certain photos symbolize whole epochs and have become part of the universal visual memory in a way that few works of paintings have managed to do. Some 90 of the most significant photos of the past 100 years have been selected for this volume to signify events that literally changed the world.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From the series that includes Paintings That Changed the World and Buildings That Changed the World comes Photos That Changed the World: The 20th Century. Editor Peter Stepan (Icons of Photography) has assembled such iconic shots as the execution of a Viet Cong officer in the street at point-blank range, a naked child running from a napalm attack outside of Saigon, one of the Kent State massacre's victims being mourned immediately after being murdered and Martin Luther King delivering the "I Have a Dream" speech. Less familiar will be the burning Reichstag four weeks after Hitler took power, the storming of the St. Petersburg's Winter Palace in October 1917 and an amazing color shot of the leaders of the recent Zapatista rebellion in Mexico. There are 30 color, 100 duotone and 20 b&w illustrations in all; most have a Western bent, but all are important moments in history, as emphasized in accompanying essays. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
In the opening paragraph of his foreword, Stepan states that this book is about the "photographs that shake us, disquiet, and distress us so deeply that they are etched in our memories forever." Some of the 30 color, 100 duotone, and 20 black-and-white illustrations he includes do not fit that criterion, but many, perhaps most, do. Those that do run from the iconic (Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Alberto Korda's Che Guevara, Eddie Adams' Execution in Saigon, Neil Armstrong's First Man on the Moon, Nick Ut's Napalm Attack) to the powerful but less familiar--a Khmer Rouge photography unit's Portraits of the Condemned, Sven Simon's Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, Sebastiao Salgado's Workers in a Serra Pelada Gold Mine. Images that seem out of place here include Diane Arbus's Boy with Hand Grenade and the unattributed Pele Leads Brazil to Win the World Cup. Energetic interpretive essays give added meaning, and often poignancy, to the pictures. Once opened, this text is hard to put down. Recommended especially for photography collections serving undergraduates and general readers. C. Baker Baylor University
Library Journal Review
DK. 2000. 1023p. photogs. index. ISBN 0-7894-6806-9. $50. PHOTOG Compiling photographs to convey a sense of time and place is not nearly as easy as some might think. Weighing in at ten pounds, America: A Celebration! could fool readers into thinking that it contained every photograph ever shot in America. Instead, it is Sandler's harvest of 19th- and 20th-century photos from the files of Getty Images, an enormous photo library. The ethic behind this bulk seems to be that more is more, and why show less if you can show it all? Though some 19th-century work begins the book, the 20th century quickly takes over. Photographs are clustered by decade. But within each chapter the assembly is random a little landscape here, some celebrities there, popular culture foibles sprinkled in, and a visual chaos throughout. Sandler (American Images) had his book blessed by a fine foreword by Walter Cronkite. But the author's enthusiasm turned into a jumble of pictures rather than a coherent historical portrait of America. Not recommended. LIFE magazine remained true to its purpose of giving readers/viewers their world in weekly visual nuggets since its own life began in 1936. It weathered television for six decades, finally ending as a monthly in May 2000. LIFE: Century of Change is a volume built on 723 photographs from the magazine's rich archives. Suffering lives appear next to riches in this book, so broad it is forced to be shallow, racing across the surface of a century with a well-aimed camera in hand. Less a tool for learning than a snapshot, this is a gift book to spark memories rather than an effort to open up the 20th century for review. Recommended as a book for browsing if budgets allow. In Photos That Changed the World, Stepan (Icons of Photography) gives us 105 images that had the lasting visual power to capture a moment that could be the image of an era held in the instant of a shutter's click for distribution to a generation. Many of the photographs collected around the theme of "changing the world" are familiar. Some were used as propaganda; all are useful as our tie to the events they depict. Sometimes their photographers are anonymous because of fear of reprisals, and many of the images were widely reproduced to build public opinion. The photos are well reproduced and gain from the explanations of time, place, and context included in the excellent short essays that accompany each. Recommended. David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
