While looking through his contact sheets in 2007 Harvey Benge noticed that one of his pictures reminded him of a Friedlander, another of an Atget, yet others of a Tillmans, a Baldessari and Adams a Picking them out he decided to make what leading UK photography critic Gerry Badger describes in his opening essay as an 'anthology' of contemporary photography featuring some of its biggest names. The result is a sharply curated and perfectly formed collection of intriguing, beguiling and seductive images, sure to delight the photography aficionado and newcomer alike. 'Of course they are all genuine original Benges. And it is important that they are all good pictures, not mere pastiches of the "originals" of which they gently but insistently remind one. This may be a game, but games can be very serious, and this is both as serious and light-hearted exploration of photographic style.' - Gerry Badger

In A Short History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?, Susie Linfield contends that by looking at images of political violence and learning to see the people in them, we engage in an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence. For many years, Linfield’s acute analysis of photographs—from events as wide-ranging as the Holocaust, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and recent acts of terrorism—has explored a complex connection between the practices of photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. By asking how photography should respond to the darker shadows of modern life, Linfield insists on the continuing moral relevance of photojournalism, while urging us not to avert our eyes from what James Agee once labeled “the cruel radiance of what is.”

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.

Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action, as well.

The first volume to answer definitively and for the first time the question: what is a news picture and how does it work?

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Pencil of Nature" by William Henry Fox Talbot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.