In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers - Softcover

Lacouture, Jean; Manchester, William; Ritchin, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393311295 ISBN 13: 9780393311297

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994

Synopsis

"This stirring volume of extraordinary photographs, presenting our times in all their elegance, squalor, courage, hope, betrayal, agony, sacrifice, heroism, and majesty, is as unsparing of its audience as it was unsparing of its photographers. . . . These pictures demand involvement." ―William Manchester, from the text

From the grandly historic to the poignantly human, from battlefield violence to the gentle pleasures of peace, In Our Time captures the past fifty years of the world in over three hundred memorable photographs, including many in color.

As the distinguished historian William Manchester explains in his provocative text, the book is a distinctive blend of reporting and art that inevitably engages the heart and mind of the viewer. Each picture is a comment upon our experience of the twentieth century.

The photographers represented here all belong to Magnum, a collective founded in 1947 to give photojournalists artistic freedom and control over the rights to their work. Magnum's archives are a repository of the masterpieces of photography of the past half-century.

Not since the landmark photographic exhibition "The Family of Man" have so many brilliant photographs documented such a range of human experience.

About this title

About the Author

Jean Lacouture is a French journalist and historian.

Fred Ritchin is the director of PixelPress and a professor of photography and imaging at New York University. He was named one of the 100 most important people in photography by American Photo magazine. He lives in New York City.

From Library Journal

Like the traveling exhibition it accompanies, this 55-year retrospective celebrates the founding of Magnum, a photographers' collective, in 1947. Manchester's lively essay is weak in the area of photo history, but, as we might expect, the photographs (by 52 members) are the book's real strength. Well reproduced, they show every aspect of human experience from the Spanish Civil War to the late 1980s: war, asylums, poverty and famine, family life, drugs, religion, crime, government, leisure, high society, and celebrities. Images by lesser-known names hold their own next to those by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and other legendary photographers. The absence of an index makes it difficult, however, to get back to particular images, which are grouped neither chronologically nor by photographer. An important book for photo history and journalism collections.
- Kathleen Collins, Great Barrington, Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393311295
• ISBN 13: 9780393311297
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 456