400+ pages of iconic images
The title of the book as per the headline is a very precise description of what this book is all about. It “puts some of the most important photographic landmarks under the microscope” as it says on the cover. And very much so.
The 50 images are presented and analyzed over the 400+ pages of the book, giving an average of 4 pages per iconic photograph. Enough to cover the basics and tell the story around each picture.
The table of content has an excellent overview with each picture in icon size and annotated with the relevant year and page to look up. The 50 images range from year 1827 to 2001. So you can quickly dive into the images of interest (I doubt you will read the book from front to back unless you are equally interested in each image).
As I “cherry picked” the images of most interest, I have not read every single page in the book, but many of them, and I really enjoyed the “behind the scenes” view that you get to each image: What was the story, the photographer, what was going on in the world at the time the shot was taken, was it staged or candid, etc. Hans-Michael Koetzle really packs a lot of information into very few pages for each picture – it is a condensed read, but certainly worth the while.
So as a photographer it is not a book that will make you wiser in terms of photo technique (f/11 vs f/5.6), but it really documents how a photograph – even with all the videos and movies available today – can be powerful and influence what we remember and how we see history. And as such it for me adds a layer to my motivation to shoot the best pictures I possibly can.
Related reading
Understanding a photograph by John Berger
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