A dynamic aerial exploration of our changing planet, published on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day   The Human Planet is a sweeping visual chronicle of the Earth today from a photographer who has circled the globe to report on such urgent issues as climate change, sustainable agriculture, and the ever-expanding human footprint. George Steinmetz is at home on every continent, documenting both untrammeled nature and the human project that relentlessly redesigns the planet in its quest to build shelter, grow food, generate energy, and create beauty through art and architecture. In his images, accompanied by authoritative text by renowned science writer Andrew Revkin, we are encountering the dramatic and perplexing new face of our ancient home.

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.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2018 Media Ecology Association's Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction Winner of the Eastern Communication Association's Everett Lee Hunt Award A behind-the-scenes account of how death is presented in the media Death is considered one of the most newsworthy events, but words do not tell the whole story. Pictures are also at the epicenter of journalism, and when photographers and editors illustrate fatalities, it often raises questions about how they distinguish between a "fit" and "unfit" image of death. Death Makes the News is the story of this controversial news practice: picturing the dead. Jessica Fishman uncovers the surprising editorial and political forces that structure how the news and media cover death. The patterns are striking, overturning long-held assumptions about which deaths are newsworthy and raising fundamental questions about the role that news images play in our society. In a look behind the curtain of newsrooms, Fishman observes editors and photojournalists from different types of organizations as they deliberate over which images of death make the cut, and why. She also investigates over 30 years of photojournalism in the tabloid and patrician press to establish when the dead are shown and whose dead body is most newsworthy, illustrating her findings with high-profile news events, including recent plane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes, homicides, political unrest, and war-time attacks. Death Makes the News reveals that much of what we think we know about the news is wrong: while the patrician press claims that they do not show dead bodies, they are actually more likely than the tabloid press to show them-even though the tabloids actually claim to have no qualms showing these bodies. Dead foreigners are more likely to be shown than American bodies. At the same time, there are other unexpected but vivid patterns that offer insight into persistent editorial forces that routinely structure news coverage of death. An original view on the depiction of dead bodies in the media, Death Makes the News opens up new ways of thinking about how death is portrayed.

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.

Over the past six years Mexico has been consumed by a brutal conflict - more than 35,000 people have been killed and kidnappings have skyrocketed. After barely winning Mexico's 2006 presidential election, Felipe Calderon escalated the battle against the country's drug cartels in an attempt to marginalise the deadly gangs and the corrupt politicians and police officers who enable them. The cartels are ruthless, meting out an awesome brutality where heads are rolled into crowded discos and dismembered bodies are abandoned on busy streets. The gruesome nature of the crimes is at once unbearable and on display for the entire country to see. The narrative of Mexico's conflict is often reduced to the bodycount on the border, but the offensive against the cartels has caused an eruption of violence that is not isolated to one region. The wounds of this war bleed into every corner of the country, staining the very fabric of Mexican life with violence, death and fear. In Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit, David Rochkind moves beyond simple depictions of carnage to explore the stress and tension left in the wake of such violence and to illustrate how this conflict will impact on and handicap Mexico's future.

Underage is an award-winning photographic documentation aimed at understanding the minds of underage male prostitutes in Thailand in a most candid and visceral way. Photographer Ohm Phanphiroj uncovers the life, choice, and consequences that these young boys are experiencing. Underage prostitution results from several reasons, from being molested by family members and/or relatives, poverty, being a runaway, and drug addiction.Underage has been exhibited worldwide, among others at Newspace Center for Photography (2011), Sommerblut International Art Festival (2011), Noordelicht Photo Festival (2012), The Kinsey Institute (2013), Tally Beck Contemporary (2014), Miami Art Festival (2014), and Documentary Arts Asia (2014).The photographic project received multiple awards, i.e. Lightwork (2012), Newspace Center for Photography (2012), Documentary Arts Asia (2014), Columbia College fellowship (2015), Noor-Nikon (2015), Society for Photographic Education (2015).

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.

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.

An outstanding photography book documenting a movement that rocked the world. Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism is a body of photographs that Syd Shelton produced for and about the British Rock Against Racism movement (RAR) of 1976-1981. For Shelton, this work was a socialist act, what he calls a "graphic argument," on behalf of marginalized lives. His practice of photographic activism began in 1973 when he was driven to document the socio cultural and political dynamics expressed on the streets of Sydney by urban Australian Aboriginal communities, the working class, and the architectural landscapes of these groups. Shelton's first solo show in 1975, "Working Class Heroes" at the Sydney Film-makers Cooperative, established his distinct activist eye. Shelton joined RAR in early 1977 on his return to England from Australia. He did so because he found his birthplace a more racist country than it had been when he left. This was marked by the increased political presence of the National Front, notably its gain of some 119,000 votes in the Greater London Council Elections of May 1977. Shelton, like millions of others, feared for the future of multi-cultural Britain. His contribution to RAR was to be on the London committee, to create graphic material with other RAR members such as the RAR publication "Temporary Hoarding," posters' badges and his photography-RAR did not have an official photographer. Shelton's instinctive need to document RAR-its events, contributors, and supporters-has resulted in the largest collection of images on the movement. Alongside his documentation of RAR, Shelton took photographs of what he calls "the contextual images," the lives and landscapes that were defined by others as "different," and that often fueled racist acts of violence by simply being. What is presented here are Shelton's authoritative visual statements as participant-photographer on the social tempo in Britain at this time and the activist potency of RAR. As collective activism, RAR's success was dependent on individual contributions to fuel the movement's activities across the country. This unique national, and eventually international, charge incorporated the visual dynamic of how Black and white RAR contributors and participants styled their bodies as another antagonistic tool against racism. These were acts of style activism-the making of an activist identity through the considered composition of clothes, accessories, hairstyles, makeup, and body language. Shelton's images prompt us to remember that the individuals at RAR carnivals, gigs, and demonstrations were the event-they were RAR. There are many versions of what RAR was and its legacy. Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism provides an auto/biographical telling of that historical moment. It reflects on how Shelton's work as a photographer contributed towards social change at a critical moment of political and racial tension in Britain.

In February 2016, Rachel Swarms, Darcy Eveleigh, Damien Cave, and Dana Canedy discovered dozens of photographs--and explored the history behind them--and chronicled them in the popular blog series Unpublished Black History. The month-long series was overwhelmingly well-received and garnered 1.7 million views and thousands of comments from readers. This book dives even deeper in the Times photo archives--known as the Morgue--to showcase 120 more photographs and their untold stories. The never-before-published photographs include a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading a rally of 4,000 people in Chicago, Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery Courthouse, and a candid behind-the-scenes shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater. Were the photos--or the people in them--not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words at an institution long known as the Gray Lady? Swarms, Eveleigh, Cave, and Canedy explore all these questions and more in this one-of-a-kind book.

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'.

Reinhard Heydrich along with Heinrich Himmler, whose deputy he was, will always be regarded as one of the most ruthless of the Nazi elite. Even Hitler described him as a man with an iron heart'. He established his fearsome reputation in the 1930s, as head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence organisation which neutralised opposition to the Nazi Party by murder and deportation. He organised Kristalnacht and played a leading role in the Holocaust, chairing the 1942 Wannsee Conference which formalised plans for the Final Solution'. In addition, as head of the Einsatzgruppen murder squads in Eastern Europe he was responsible for countless murders. Appointed Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, he died of wounds inflicted by British trained SOE operatives in Prague in May 1942. The reprisals that followed his assassination were extreme by even the terrible standards of Nazi ruthlessness. Heydrich's shocking and leading role in the Nazi regime is graphically portrayed in this Images of War book.

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.

For more than forty years Angola has faced conflict. From 1961-1975, there was the struggle for independence from Portuguese rule. This was followed by a period of civil war which, in one form or another, extended until 2001, when the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in an ambush. This led to a cease-fire, armistice and peace. As a result of these 40 years of war the country has suffered a terrible legacy of unexploded mines and other weapons. Photographer Sean Sutton, who works alongside MAG (Mines Advisory Group) has recorded the impact that this has had on the country and its people, as well the work of those clearing the mines. MAG has been working in Angola for more than 10 years, clearing tens of thousands of landmines and items of unexploded ordnance. The book is introduced by Heather Mills who is a patron of MAG and has campaigned vigorously on the issue of landmines. There is also a text by the renowned photojournalist Tim Page whose photographs during the Vietnam War were published worldwide. Page is the subject of many documentaries, two films and the author of nine books. Lou McGrath, Director of MAG, contributes a further text contextualising the work of landmine clearance.

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.

In February 2001, Foot and Mouth Disease arrived in Cumbria. At its peak Cumbria was the worst affected county in Britain with a staggering 41 per cent of all cases. For the local community, the environmental and social consequences were to prove devastating. As a local resident, leading UK photographer John Darwell found himself surrounded by the effects of the disease. Over the next twelve months, he committed himself to recording what was taking place. Despite government reports to the contrary, the Cumbrian countryside became largely a 'no-go area', whilst on the farms thousands of animals were destroyed, their bodies burnt on the now notorious pyres. The ultimate clean-up of the infected farms led to extraordinary lengths being taken to eradicate the virus. "Dark Days" represents, perhaps, the most complete record of this time and provides a powerful and emotive insight into one of the most dramatic and destructive periods in British farming history. It is published in association with Littoral Arts.

The remarkable photographs in "Forever Engand" were taken at Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield. Initially built by a London accountant to entertain his house guests, it opened to the public in 1929 and is the oldest model village in the world, welcoming close to 200,000 visitors each year. Now a world famous folly, it stands as a tribute to English eccentricity, humour, determination and craftsmanship. Its particular charm is that it presents a vision of England firmly rooted in an idyllic 1930s timewarp. Yet it is its quirkiness that Bailey has captured so stunningly. In wonderful tableaux of everyday life he creates an extraordinarily rich and powerful sense of character and atmosphere. Bekonscot's miniature population of 3,000 people and 300 animals becomes real, their lives frozen in time, as we are carried back to an England we all know and long for - an England of our imaginations - when life was simple, secure, unchanging.

Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as 'witnessing', the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of 'compassion fatigue'. In the twenty-first century, the advent of digital photography, camera phones and socialmedia platforms has altered the relationship between photographers, the medium and the audience- as well as contributing to an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment and professional and amateur journalism. The Violence of the Image explores how new vernacular and artistic modes of photographic production articulate international friction.This innovative, timely book makes a major contribution to discussions about the power of the image in conflict.

The author presents an account of the Battle of France: the forty-five traumatic days from May 10 to June 24, 1940 that resulted in one of the most remarkable military victories of modern times. During those six weeks, six nations found themselves at war, fighting across four countries. From the polders of the Netherlands in the north to the mountains of the Alps in the south, and from the Rhine valley to the Atlantic coast, Jean Paul Pallud explores every corner of the battlefield, the camera recording the scenes today where 50 years ago Dutch, Belgian, German, French, British and Italian soldiers were locked in mortal combat. Battles great and small are described and illustrated to colour the canvas of both the broad strategy and the individual firefight in Hitler's victorious campaign of Blitzkrieg in the West.

In "Our Man in Havana", Graham Greene wrote that 'to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and the city no longer exists except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.' In this, his third book, John Comino-James shows us the world that is contained within just a few streets in the very ordinary neighbourhood of Cayo Hueso in Havana, Cuba. Through portraits and candid observation, he builds an honest and intimate record of a small and tight-knit community. This is not the Havana of the tourist, but a city in which people go about their daily lives, dealing with the everyday realities that have resulted from decades of political isolation. In a powerful and beautifully written afterword, Comino-James intersperses his experiences of several vists to the area, with fascinating information on the history of Cuba and the city of Havana.