In Toy Soldiers, Simon Brann Thorpe blurs the boundaries between document, landscape and concept-based photography to explore this conflict. He examines the impact and potential consequences of the stalemate. Through real soldiers - posed as toy soldiers - he reveals the current situation in Western Sahara, a nation in waiting trapped in an historic cycle of colonial conflict, displacement and endless non-resolution. The work is a unique collaboration between Thorpe, a military commander and the men under his command. Shot entirely on location in the isolated and hauntingly beautiful territory known as 'Liberated Western Sahara' it is influenced by the historic works of photographers such as Mathew Brady, Roger Fenton and Edward Curtis. Toy Soldiers provides a contemporary archive on the issue of non-resolution and the paradigm of post colonial cycles of violence within modern conflicts.

The updated retrospective published for McCullin's 80th birthday. Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction - the definitive edition. McCullin's reputation has long been established as one of the greatest photographers of conflict in the last century. In the fourteen years since the first publication of the book, McCullin has shed the role of war photographer and become a great landscape artist. He has also travelled widely through Africa, India, the Middle East and among the tribes living in Stone Age conditions in Indonesia. His journey from the back streets of north London to his rural retreat in the depths of Somerset is unparalleled. It includes a passage through the most terrible scenes of recent history, for which his stark views of the West Country offer him some redemption.

Paolo Pellegrin (Magnum Photos) and journalist Scott Anderson were in Lebanon during the conflict, on assignment for The New York Times. Pellegrin's photographs intimately capture the fear and powerlessness of the Lebanese population in the face of the ceaseless Israeli air strikes, revealing the terror and despair of families and friends witnessing the deaths of their loved ones, whilst around them their homes were destroyed. In particular, Pellegrin also documented the aftermath of the attack on the village of Qana in southern Lebanon; many of the victims children, his photographs reveal the immense suffering of the civilians involved. Alongside his work exposing the consequences of indiscriminate attacks on a civilian population is a 3000-word account by Scott Anderson, who accompanied Pellegrin in Lebanon. Pellegrin and Anderson were both wounded in a missile attack by an Israeli drone, which fired on their vehicle as they traveled through the city of Tyre.

The first comprehensive consideration of Life magazine’s groundbreaking and influential contribution to the history of photography

From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this volume examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The work of photographers both celebrated and overlooked—including Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith—is explored in the context of the creative and editorial structures at Life. Contributions from 25 scholars in a range of fields, from art history to American studies, provide insights into how the photographs published in Life—used to promote a predominately white, middle-class perspective—came to play a role in cultural dialogues in the United States around war, race, technology, art, and national identity.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, as well as photographers’ archives, this generously illustrated volume presents previously unpublished materials, such as caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, that shed new light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays.

Nic Dunlop spent 20 years photographing Burma under military rule. His new book, Brave New Burma, is an intimate portrait in words and pictures of a country finally emerging from decades of dictatorship, isolation and fear. From the frontlines of the civil war to deceptively tranquil cities, from the home of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the lives of ordinary people struggling to survive, Brave New Burma is both an historic collection of rare images and a powerful expose of Burma's crisis. Change has come to Burma for the first time in decades. But change brings dangers, including the erasing of history and the invention of a new Burma in appearance alone. Brave New Burma is a haunting record of a country now struggling to recreate itself.

The war in Darfur, which has been controversially termed as 'genocide', is still ongoing, alongside a tardy peace negotiation process, which began back in 2010. Around 300,000 people are estimated to have died from the combined effects of war, hunger and disease. Darfur is inhabited by tribes of both African and Arab lineage. Both groups had co-existed for centuries, however, as a result of the increasing desertification of the region in the 1970s and 1980s, the nomadic Arab tribes began to head south in search of water and grazing land. They soon arrived at the settle-ments of the Africans. Skirmishes followed, though the fighting was small in scale and ended in 1994. The conflict resumed in 2003, when African rebel groups under the banner of the Darfur Liberation Front responded to the neglect and marginalization of their communities by initiating attacks. The Sudan government replied with major land and air assaults. By the summer of 2003 the infamous Janjaweed had become involved. By Spring 2004, they had killed several thousand non-arabs and an estimated million more had been driven from their homes. Yet it was not until more than 100,000 refugees, pursued by Janjaweed militia, escaped to neighbouring Chad that the conflict captured the attention of an international audience.

The Landscape of Murder documents all the sites where murders occurred in London between January 1st, 2011 and December 31st, 2012. In total 209 murders were committed over this two year period. Most murders make the news for only a fleeting moment and the landscape in which they occur reverts back to normality very quickly after the forensic teams leave. Yet the scars remain, sometimes subtle, sometimes very open, whether a single solitary flower or the gathering of grieving family and friends. Sometimes nothing remains to show that a life has ended violently in a particular location. Antonio Zazueta Olmos seeks to give memory to what are mostly forgotten events, in unseen places where great violence has occurred. A violence that is mostly silent, private and unseen by the wider public. The project has taken him to parts of London he knew little or nothing about and in the process he has created an alternative portrait of London, one shaped by violence and inequality.

Red Thistle, the 2011 winner of The European Publishers Award for Photography, is a powerful and fascinating exploration of the important but relatively unknown region and people of the Northern Caucasus. It lies between the Black and Caspian Seas and is within European Russia. Wars have been fought here for centuries - the most recent in Chechnya. Monteleone examines the stubborn, rebellious culture of this region, which although part of Russia, differs in the ethnicity, religion and social customs of its inhabitants.

The past has never looked so alive as presented on the jaw-droppingly handsome pages of Retrographic, a ground-breaking book hailed in the media as a revolutionary new way to access the past. By gathering an exclusive collection of 120 of the world's most important images from photographic grandmasters such as Dorothea Lange and Alfred Eisenstaedt, as-well-as Pulitzer Prize winners Malcolm Brown and Nick Ut - this is a book which truly celebrates our shared visual heritage. Through accepting Retrographic into its prestigious research collection, London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has recognised the book's importance. Alongside rarer images, Retrographic transforms these world-famous classics from the black and white of the past, and allows these visual time-capsules to explode into the living colour of the 21st century. The skilfully colourised photographs provided by Retrographic's talented team of international contributors are displayed alongside a fact-packed narrative from digital journalist Michael D. Carroll.

It is all but impossible to think of September 11th 2001 and not, at the same time, recall an image. The overwhelmingly visual coverage in the world's media pictured a spectacle of terror, from images of the collapsing towers, to injured victims and fatigued firefighters. In the days, weeks and months that followed, this vast collection of photographs continued to circulate relentlessly. This book investigates the psychological impact of those photographs on a stunned American audience. Drawing on trauma theory, this book asks whether the prolonged exposure of audience to photographs was cathartic or damaging. It explores how first the collective memory of the event was established in the American psyche and then argues that through repetitive use of the most powerful pictures, the culture industry created a dangerously simple 9/11 metanarrative. At the same time, people began to reclaim and use photography to process their own feelings, most significantly in 'communities' of photographic memorial websites. Such exercises were widely perceived as democratic and an aid to recovery. This book interrogates that assumption, providing a new understanding of how audiences see and process news photography in times of crisis.

Spanning four decades of radical political and social change in Italy, this interdisciplinary study explores photography's relationship with Italian painting, film, literature, anthropological research and international photography. Evocative and powerful, Italian social documentary photography from the 1930s to the 1960s is a rich source of cultural history, reflecting a time of dramatic change. This book shows, through a wide range of images (some published for the first time) that to fully understand the photography of this period we must take a more expansive view than scholars have applied to date, considering issues of propaganda, aesthetics, religion, national identity and international influences. By setting Italian photography against a backdrop of social documentary and giving it a distinctive place in the global history of photography, this exciting volume of original research is of interest to art historians and scholars of Italian and visual culture studies.

In art and literature, walls are frequently used as powerful symbols of division. For the people of Palestine, however, the wall that cuts deeply into their land and society is all too real, snaking through over 700 kilometres of the West Bank. It throttles Palestinians, seals off Israelis, and all but guarantees perpetual ignorance, fear and rage on both sides. Keep Your Eye on the Wall brings together seven award-winning artist-photographers and four essayists, all responding to the Wall in images or words, specially commissioned for this book. The photographers present unique perspectives, whether documenting the journey of labourers across the barrier, the desolation of abandoned checkpoints or the tattered posters of "martyrs" on a wall in Gaza. Informed, critical and powerful, the photographs constitute, in the words of French philosopher of art Georges Didi-Huberman, 'a space for struggle'. The book fetaures photography from Taysir Batniji, Raed Bawayah, Rula Halawani, Noel Jabbour, Raeda Saadeh, Steve Sabella and Kai Wiedenhofer; text from Malu Halasa, Yael Lerer, Christine Leuenberger and Adania Shibli and a foreword from Raja Shehadeh.

Meloni's original aim was to connect the history of troubled countries with their current events to explore new ways of capturing uprisings against totalitarianism and the after-effects of colonial ventures. 'My intent was to try, within the limits of visual language, to understand and rationalise a conflict- its roots and evolution-and thus position it within its historical context. The Islamic State's emergence was a logical development, and I can potentially understand why many young men in Iraq, Syria and Libya decided to join. I asked myself many times: if I had been born Iraqi and my family was killed by US soldiers, what might I have done?'

Following on from her epic photographical journey behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Ghosts The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in Decay Rebecca Bathory undertakes an emotional and thought provoking journey to Fukushima. As one of the first photographers to be granted access to the site, Bathory now presents never-before-seen images which provide a unique and moving meditation on human failure seen through the lens of an accomplished artist. Bathory's images take you behind the scenes of the ghost town that is Fukushima, at turns heartbreaking and devastating. These photographs ask the question - what next for a nuclear future?

A digitally remastered facsimile edition of Danny Lyon's seminal 1971 photobook, highly influential in the history of documentary photography. Conversations with the Dead provides an extraordinary photographic record of life inside six Texas prisons and the relationships Lyon built with the inmates. Revolutionary at the time of publication, it was one of the first photobooks to include ephemera. This new edition has been updated with an afterward by Lyon himself detailing what happened to the inmates in the 40 years since the book was first published. It also offers new, unseen material including outtake images, audio recordings and newly commissioned texts on a specially created microsite as a free ibook edition of this landmark publication. Features: - A new afterward by Danny Lyon

These photographs from Shanghai explore the new culture rapidly developing in China as it expands its domestic market at breakneck speed. As elsewhere in the world, the appeal of modern consumer goods and the benefits they bring is there for all to see. But such rapid change has its dark side. As the not-so-old cultural structures become increasingly irrelevant, there are threats to social cohesion as communal identity gives way to individuality and alienation. What we are seeing now is a new Cultural Revolution, a capitalist Cultural Revolution that is more complete, more total, and no less ideological than the Cultural Revolution that was instigated by Chairman Mao in the 1960s.
"Lovin' It" is introduced by John Gittings, for many years foreign leader-writer and East Asia editor at the "Guardian." Gittings first visited China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution and in 2001 he opened the "Guardian"'s first staff bureau on the Chinese mainland, in Shanghai.
The book also includes an interview with Hinton by writer and cultural critic Nigel Warburton.
London-based photographer Adam Hinton has produced several documentary projects based on various communities, including a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a coal mining family in the Ukraine, and a Himba community in Namibia. His personal and commissioned photography have won numerous awards and been exhibited at various galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers' Gallery, London.

The stolen snapshot is a staple of the modern tabloid press, as ubiquitous as it is notorious. The first in-depth history of British tabloid photojournalism, this book explores the origin of the unauthorised celebrity photograph in the early 20th century, tracing its rise in the 1900s through to the first legal trial concerning the right to privacy from photographers shortly after the Second World War. Packed with case studies from the glamorous to the infamous, the book argues that the candid snap was a tabloid innovation that drew its power from Britain's unique class tensions. Used by papers such as the Daily Mirror and Daily Sketch as a vehicle of mass communication, this new form of image played an important and often overlooked role in constructing the idea of the press photographer as a documentary eyewitness. From Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson to aristocratic debutantes Lady Diana Cooper and Margaret Whigham, the rage of the social elite at being pictured so intimately without permission was matched only by the fascination of working class readers, while the relationship of the British press to social, economic and political power was changed forever.Initially pioneered in the metropole, tabloid-style photojournalism soon penetrated the journalistic culture of most of the globe. This in-depth account of its social and cultural history is an invaluable source of new research for historians of photography, journalism, visual culture, media and celebrity studies.

A rusting anti-aircraft fort in the North Sea. A German submarine base in France. A Flak tower in a Viennese park - more than 70 years after the end of World War II, its legacy can still be seen from Europe to Japan. World War II Abandoned Places explores more than 100 bunkers, pillboxes, submarine bases, forts and gun emplacements from the North Sea to Okinawa. Included are defensive structures, such as the Maginot Line on France's eastern border with Germany, Germany's own western and eastern border defences, and the Atlantic Wall, the German-built bunkers and pillboxes on the coast from Denmark down to Brittany. The book also includes both Hitler's and Himmler's Eastern Front bunkers in Poland. But beyond the military installations, the book explores the ruins of concentration camps, the empty village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and the dilapidated Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, among other non-military places. With 150 outstanding colour photographs, World War II Abandoned Places is a brilliant pictorial examination of both the military and non-military legacy of the conflict.

To describe the complexity of this ever-changing and multi-layered terrain, Kremer creates aesthetic, orderly and beautiful compositions that parallel the defense mechanisms developed to protect Israelis from the painful reality of the current political situation. Rather than confronting the Israeli occupation in the way that it has been absorbed by the world's media, Kremer adopts a more subtle approach. For him, the media's aggressive representation of reality numbs people's sensibilities making them callous to the suffering of others.Instead of shock, Kremer seeks to challenge the viewer, using the landscape as a focus to understand the overwhelming impact of the situation at the deepest of levels. Four decades ago the historian and philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibovich, forewarned that the Israeli occupation was a cancerous disease in the heart of the nation. As Kremer himself says, 'my goal is to reveal how every piece of land has become infected with loaded sediments of the ongoing conflict'.

Delving into the complexities of contemporary reportage, this book draws from moral philosophy and histories of photojournalism to understand the emergence of this distinct practice and discuss its evolution in a digital era. In arguing that the digitization of photography obliges us to radically challenge some of the traditional conceptions of press photography, this book addresses the historic opposition between artistic and journalistic photographs, showing and challenging how this has subtly inspired support for a forensic approach to photojournalism ethics. The book situates this debate within questions of relativism over what is 'moral', and normative debates over what is 'journalistic', alongside technical debates as to what is 'possible', to underpin a discussion of photojournalism as an ethical, moral, and societally important journalistic practice. Including detailed comparative analyses of codes of ethics, examination of controversial cases, and a study of photojournalism ethics as applied in different newsrooms, the book examines how ethical principles are applied by the global news media and explores the potential for constructive dialogue between different voices interested in pursuing the best version of photojournalism. A targeted, comprehensive and engaging book, this is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students of photojournalism, as well as philosophy, communications and media studies more broadly.

The elite hotels of Africa serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social and cultural aspects of Africa and the global uniformity of international business culture. They are also the places where the unseen resources of many African countries - oil, diamonds, minerals - are bartered away behind closed doors. These are environments which have a strangely hybrid quality - their design, their cuisine, musak and global TV echoing 'international' standards. Yet they are ultimately sites of tension, where cultures collide and conflict. At the same time, however, these hotels are viewed by their local communities as symbols of achievement which contradict the more usual representations of Africa.Far from being despised as enclaves of the rich, these hotels have become 'objects of desire', the dream venue for weddings and where to be invited to a business conference is to have reached the pinnacle of success. And for most hotel employees there is the reassurance of wages that are higher than they could earn elsewhere and therefore their duties are carried out with pride and self-assurance.