Books like The face of Asia by Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

A photographic portrait of New York City’s residents, capturing ordinary lives in extraordinary moments.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, at eighty-six, is the old master of European photography. Paris - the city and its people - has pervaded his work ever since he first exchanged his paintbrushes for a camera, influenced by the Surrealist movement of the late 1920s. A propos de Paris presents the photographer's personal selection of more than 130 of his best photographs of Paris, taken over fifty years. As ever, his vision transforms photojournalism into high art, revealing images of Paris with a rare, dreamlike, almost crystalline clarity. He unfolds before our eyes a kind of intellectual reconstruction of the city, reaching far beyond the cliches of tourism and popular myth. Accompanying texts by Vera Feyder and Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues discuss the history of Cartier-Besson's engagement with the city and its place in his achievement. This is a unique gallery of urban landscapes rendered by a great sensibility - Cartier-Besson's homage to the place perhaps closest to his heart.

"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.