How do photojournalists get the pictures that bring us the action from the world's most dangerous places? How do picture editors decide which photos to scrap and which to feature on the front page?
Find out in Get the Picture, a personal history of fifty years of photojournalism by one of the top journalists of the twentieth century. John G. Morris brought us many of the images that defined our era, from photos of the London air raids and the D-Day landing during World War II to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He tells us the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures like these, which are reproduced in this book, and provides intimate and revealing portraits of the men and women who shot them, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith. A firm believer in the power of images to educate and persuade, Morris nevertheless warns of the tremendous threats posed to photojournalists today by increasingly chaotic wars and the growing commercialism in publishing, the siren song of money that leads editors to seek pictures that sell copies rather than those that can change the way we see the world.
John G. Morris is a University of Chicagoan who served as a Hollywood correspondent for Life, picture editor for Life's London bureau during World War II, picture editor at Ladies' Home Journal, the first executive editor of the Magnum Photos press agency, picture editor for both the Washington Post and the New York Times, and a correspondent and editor for National Geographic.
Table of Contents
Foreword 1.Tuesday Was a Good D-Day for Life 2.My Life Begins 3.The Thirty-first Floor 4."To Suffer or to Fight" 5.The "Picture Men" 6.Hollywood Bureau 7.The "Day of Wrath" 8.The Longest Wait 9.To the Beach 10."Paris Is Free Again!" 11.Beatrice and Bruce and Mary 12."People Are People" 13.The Missouri Workshop 14.Red-baited 15."Nothing but Champagne!" 16."Personal and Confidential" 17.Disaster 18.Decisive Moments 19.Chim's Fate 20.The Many Woes of W. Eugene Smith 21.Camelot and Cuba 22.Departure 23.To the Post 24.Jobless at Forty-nine 25.To the Times 26.A Table at Sardi's 27.The Gund of '68 28.Abe in Orbit 29.Special Transmissions 30.Various Quests 31.After Gene 32.Geographic Agonistes 33.Paris, Capital of Photojournalism 34.The Gulf Afterword Acknowledments Index