The Savvy Traveller - Photoessay: National Geographic Greatest Portraits: In Focus

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Editor: Leah Bendavid-Val
A National Geographic Publication

A beautiful collection of photographs culled from National Geographic's extensive photographic archives, this volume presents a powerful retrospective of portrait photography. Spanning more than 100 years of images and representing the work of more than 150 photographers, In Focus includes never-before-seen photographs alongside award-winning favorites. This rich collection is accompanied by text written by photographers that reveals their experiences as they captured people in the moment, as well as their evaluations of National Geographic portraits produced during each decade.

National Geographic photographers have taken more pictures of people than of wildlife or landscapes or scientific experiments or archaeological digs or national monuments because photographers and viewers alike are truly fascinated by people—more intrigued by each other than almost anything else. The subjects of National Geographic portraits are ordinary citizens and exotic strangers, individuals and groups, of the past and present.

Opening with a compelling look at National Geographic's contribution to the knowledge of the world's peoples through photography, the chapters that follow explore critical periods in world history and photographic style and trace the evolution of portrait photography and feature fascinating insights from the photographers—including Sam Abell, William Albert Allard, Jodi Cobb, Stuart Franklin, and David Alan Harvey.

From Publishers Weekly
The prickly political implications of portrait photography are perhaps at their most evident in this hefty (seven pounds) and gorgeously glossy compilation of work by National Geographic photographers. As the frank essays by such photographers as Sam Abell, Jodie Jobb and William Albert Allard beginning each chapter reveal, behind the unthreatening National Geographic cameras lenses, often less-than-admirable mechanisms were at work. Stuart Franklin writes of the editorial pressure on photographers to provide "pictures of pretty girls" to the point where "hundreds of bare-breasted women, all from poorer countries, were published at a time of booming subscription rates." Editor Bendavid-Val writes of National Geographic's propensity for avoiding controversial issues at home in the United States; turmoil has been less thorny to document in faraway places. "The emotional distance was easy to maintain in an age when communication was cumbersome and long-distance travel was uncommon." Still, a photograph of thieves' severed heads on a billboard in China, or even the photograph "Afghan Girl," published in 1985 and arguably National Geographic's most well-known photograph, pierce through this self-imposed emotional shield. Beyond the isolationism and voyeurism is something oddly moving about this collection of 280-plus portraits: it forms a giant mosaic of American identity, a self-portrait composed of how we look at others.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

$30.00 (hardcover)

Other volumes in the National Geographic Greatest Photographs series
	Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs
	Wide Angle: National Geographic Greatest Places