A calm evening with a hardcover history of fifty famous photographs

There are evenings when the house is quiet, the kitchen is put right, and she wants something to look at slowly. This TASCHEN hardcover of 427 pages offers fifty landmark photographs, from the 1820s to Martin Parr, each with the story of how it came to matter, so that looking and learning happen together.

Photo Icons is a hardcover of 427 pages, written in English and published by TASCHEN on October 11, 2019, as part of its Bibliotheca Universalis line. The author, Koetzle, is a Munich based freelance writer and journalist who writes mainly on the history and aesthetics of photography. The subject here is fifty photographs that have entered common memory, each given its own account of where it came from and what it did in the world.

The book begins at the start of the medium, with Niépce’s rooftop picture from 1827, which needed an exposure of about eight hours, and Daguerre’s street scene from 1838. It then moves through the Surrealist experiments of the 1920s and the grittier photorealism of the 1930s, which includes Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, and arrives at Martin Parr. Power and fame are here in the portraits of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe. So are the plainer human moments: Doisneau’s Kiss in Front of City Hall from 1950, and Nick Ut’s picture of nine year old Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked toward the camera from napalm in Vietnam.

The approach is part history and part case study. Each photograph is looked at closely, and the questions are what it shows, how it came to be seen so widely, and what social, historical and artistic weight it carries. The central idea, as the description presents it, is that a few images shape how a whole culture sees an era, and that this influence can be examined rather than just felt.

It suits a reader who likes to look carefully and learn at an unhurried pace, and nothing in the description suggests she needs to know cameras first. It tends to matter when someone starts to wonder why certain pictures seem to be everywhere, or wants to place them in order. One caution: some of the images record violence and suffering, and Ut’s photograph is one of them. That is worth knowing before the book is left open on a kitchen table or a living room shelf.

As a read, this is a large reference style volume rather than a novel, with fifty separate entries that can be taken in any order. At 427 pages in hardcover it is a book to settle with, not to carry. Size and weight are not given in the details, so check them if shelf space matters. Digital Camera suggested using it to discover one photographer a month, and Rumbos praised the beauty behind the lens of well known photographers. Whether that pace and format suit her is a matter of taste, not measurement. What stays is how familiar these pictures already are, and how much more they offer once someone has told her how they came about.