Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism - Softcover

Morris, John G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226539148 ISBN 13: 9780226539140

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"I am a journalist," says John G. Morris, "but not a reporter and not a photographer." He is a picture editor--the person who selects which photos get used in a newspaper or magazine--and he's worked for some of the top names in the industry: at Life under Henry Luce, for Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, and for Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, where his bold page-one use of a photograph by Eddie Adams of the execution of a Vietcong suspect by Nyugen Ngoc Loan became one of the Vietnam War's most enduring images.

Morris, who also served as the first executive editor for the Magnum photojournalist press agency, looks back at his career in this lively memoir. Among the colleagues who turn up in anecdotes are Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lee Miller, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Capa; the book leads with a grainy Capa photograph of the D-day landing, 1 of only 11 shots that survived a freak accident in the London photo labs of Life as Morris and his team raced against the clock to get images to America in time for the next issue. There are over 100 other powerful photographs, taken at the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, the Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek, and the front lines of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, and other locales. In addition to being a dynamic storyteller, Morris is also steadfast in his determination that photojournalists should be given the freedom--both in resources and lack of censorship--to provoke us into a new awareness of what is happening in the world. --Ron Hogan

From the Back Cover:

"Get the Picture is an extraordinary account of one of the most interesting lives of the twentieth century. John Morris has been present and engaged, as few others have been, with the definitive and decisive moments of modern history. Possibly no living man has had such an extensive involvement with the world of photographic expression, with the great photographers and photographs of this century. From Cartier-Bresson to Robert Capa to W. Eugene Smith to most of the living greats, Morris was with them, giving spiritual guidance and unfaltering fraternity, and embraced with passion the pursuit of justice and excellence. His words and life represent one of the great stories of our time."--David and Peter Turnley, photojournalists, co-authors of Beijing Spring and Moments of Revolution

"Not only is John Morris's Get the Picture an extraordinary history of photojournalism--it is as well an exciting, revealing trip through the intricacies of picture publishing in its truest light. A real page-turner that had me still reading at sunup. Don't miss it."--Gordon Parks, photojournalist, author of Half Past Autumn

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0226539148
• ISBN 13: 9780226539140
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332