I just finished Time Of Change, which is a collection of photojournalism images documenting the civil rights struggle by Bruce Davidson from 1961-1965. Bruce started shooting the struggle of blacks in New York City with the likes of Malcolm X, and then moved on to Chicago before beginning to shoot the non-violent protest movement in the south with events like the March from Selma to Birmingham and the Freedom Riders.

It’s a really fascinating collection of images from someone who, mostly on his own initiative took up photographing one of the pivotal moments of American history.

The images are striking because they don’t just show angry crowds and marchers or policemen blasting gatherers with water hoses. They show photos like a little girl playing behind a chain-link fence or a father who was crippled at work holding his two sons. They’re photos of the people who lived it.

It’s an excellent read and wonderful photos of an amazing moment in history. If you’ve got a real passion for this period of time this would be a Buy It. If you’re just a casual reader, it’s a Borrow It.

Last week a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this article by Photography School Online of the 30 Photos That Changed The World. Now of course everyone can say that this photo should be in or that photo shouldn’t, but I don’t think that that necessarily makes a very interesting discussion.

Where I take offense to the list is not that “oh they left out this photo or that photo”, but more in what I consider to be the overall tone of the article. I find it to be very American-centric. Of the 30 images, fully 10% are of American presidents. There are exactly 0 other world leaders. 4 of them center around the War in Vietnam, and 4 are about the struggle for Civil Rights in America. Over 3/4 of the images are specifically about America and it’s involvement in the world. And yes, while both the major “players” in the photo above are Vietnamese, this is a photo that is inextricably linked to America and American hegemony.

There are no images of Gandi, Hitler, Stalin, Thatcher, Churchill, Castro, Guevara, or Mussolini. There are no images of the devastating Tsunami or the battlegrounds of WW1. I’m not saying that these photos aren’t important and world-changing photos, rather I’m saying that they seem to be specifically important and world-changing photos for Americans, and the rest of the world is severely underrepresented.

I really do think that American navel-gazing is dangerous, and we need to begin to see the rest of the world not just through the lens of how it impacts us, but also how they impact each other.

Like I said, I don’t want to get down to specifics of “they forgot this photo” or “that photo wasn’t that important” (except for the Abbey Road photo… that one actually irritates me. Really? World-changing?). I love that these folks have started the conversation of what photographs really have impacted the world. I just wish that it wasn’t quite so unilaterally American.

This book is really a collection of 1-page biographies of 90 photographers who helped to define photography in the 20th century. Each photographer in the book is given a spread with one page devoted to a single image the biographer would like to talk about that is “representative” of the photographer’s greater body of work, and sometimes a smaller photo inset into the biographical details.

There are many amazing photographs and, while the biographies are occasionally written in an “overly art-snobbish” voice, the biographical details and insights into the photographers and their works is fascinating, often giving historical context to photos that, on their own, I wouldn’t necessarily view in that manner.

When I started reading the book I decided I was going to put a mini sticky note on the photographers that I wanted to check out more about. Looking at the forest of sticky notes stuck to the top is proving to be a daunting task! I decided that I would not put sticky notes on photographers like Dorothea Lang, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the like who I was already very familiar with and to just focus on those that I have little knowledge of, such as August Sander, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Umbo, Tina Modotti, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Heinz Hajek-Halke, Martín Chambi, Edward Weston, Arnold Newman, Yevgeny Tschaldey, Ernst Haas, Margaret Bourke-White, Willy Ronis, Paul Strand, William Klein, W. Eugene Smith, and many more. Pretty much I’m looking at over half the book. That’s gonna be a whole lot of reading!

On a Buy It, Borrow It, or Trash It scale, I’d say this is a definite Borrow It. While there are some wonderfully inspirational photos in here, for me there is no sense of cohesiveness about the photos themselves (as it should be!). The purpose of the book is to introduce you to photographers and point you in the direction of where you can find out more. Read it once, check out the ones you want to learn more about, and return it.