Pictures of the Times: A Century of Photography from the New York Times

Peter Galassi makes an interesting point in his intro to this book: the New York Times, like other papers, comes out daily and so has to use photos even though not much might have happened in the previous twenty-four hours. This is where the Picture Editor earns his salary by providing the various department editors with interesting non-event photos (what I used to call 'Any old time stuff' when I Art Directed a news weekly) that will fill an editorial hole and grab the reader. Page thirty-one has one of these photos, a lovely shot of three children looking in a small window display with the caption: Picking the Christmas card for teacher, it was taken in 1910. Only a few of the 150 photos in the book are `Any old time stuff', the rest are of local, national and international significance and depict the range of human activity you would expect to see in a paper. The first photo is a Wright Brother's flight from 1909, the last a NYC firefighter's funeral in 1996. You can sort of follow the history of the country (and the world) looking through these pages. All the photos are dated and have brief captions. The back of the book has a fascinating fourteen page chronology about the technical developments in news photography and the changes over the years to the Times photo department. A much more ambitious and lavish book using the Times photo archives is The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives and like 'Pictures of the Times' it has one photo a page but divides the decade into sections: America in the world; mechanization, growing up in America; fame and infamy; ways of life. It has about 200 photos. Both books will interest anyone who works in news media or just wants to relive the past with the help of two handsomely produced publications. ***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' below the cover.