Get the Picture
A Personal History of Photojournalism
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.
“His best stories from the field are not tagging along with Capa and Hemingway . . . or having drinks at the Ritz in Paris with Marlene Dietrich; they are his less flashy but moving descriptions of the Japanese internment camps in California.”
“Going through Morris’s book of memories, I felt I was sitting in front of a magic lantern.”
“Morris has a clear-eyed, detached perspective on his former role as one of the key arbiters of taste for such publications as Life, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. . . . He was one of a handful of top picture editors with the power to shape Americans’ collective memory of world events, from the London air raids for WWII to school desegregation.”
“[Morris] weaves photographers, anecdotes, players, history and a credo or two into an engaging and informative tale.”
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
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