Books like Fifty-one years by David Goldblatt

A seminal collection of essays by Susan Sontag that examines photography’s history, meaning and role in capitalist societies.

Guide to crafting compelling digital photographs through disciplined design, composition, and post‑processing techniques.

"In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the American journalist Carleton Beals. Beals's explicit goal was to expose the corruption of Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and the long, torturous relationship between the United States and Cuba.". "As novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu points out in the essay that accompanies this selection of photographs from the Getty Museum's collection, Evans's photographs are the work of an artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric. Evans's photographs of Cuba were made by a young, still maturing artist who - as Codrescu argues - was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure prominently in his later work."--BOOK JACKET.

Yevgeny Khaldei was born in 1917, just months before the Bolshevik Revolution. While he had only four grades of school - poverty forced him to take a job cleaning steam engines - by the age of fifteen he had crafted a camera for himself out of a cardboard box and his grandmother's spectacles. Before long, his heroic images of Soviet life were appearing in Pravda. At age eighteen, Khaldei was hired by TASS. By the end of World War II Khaldei was twenty-eight and one of Russia's greatest combat photographers. Three years later, in a period of heightened repression, he was fired from TASS. After Stalin's death he became reassociated with Pravda, photographing artists, musicians, writers, and heads of state. He remained with Pravda until 1972, when a resurgence of state anti-Semitism forced his retirement. Khaldei's photographs are a powerful and poignant documentation of twentieth-century history. Now eighty years old, he still resides in Moscow.

"Conceived as an exhibition for MoMA in New York in 1955, with a catalogue published both by Maco Magazine Corporation and Simon and Schuster, The Family of Man has been heavily criticized, usually for its sentimentality and its disingenuous simplicity. Although indeed sentimental, The Family of Man was not as simple as it looked. ... The de-politicization of the photography was in fact a calculated piece of political image-making, stating that American values were the only universal values, and that the world could be one big happy family under the beneficent guidance of Uncle Sam. ... One of the ironic aspects of the project is the way its whole aesthetic derives from those German and Soviet exhibitions and propaganda books of the 1930s. The sententious tone, the grim determinism, the tendentious ideological stance, even the design, place The Family of Man in the propagandist mode of modernism rather than in the utopian wing to which it nominally aspires. Nevertheless, and this is an important point, it contains many fine photographs."--The Photobook : A History Volume II / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004.