Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism

Amazon.com
"I am a journalist," says John G. Morris, "but not a reporter and not a photographer." He is a picture editor--the person who selects which photos get used in a newspaper or magazine--and he's worked for some of the top names in the industry: at Life under Henry Luce, for Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, and for Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, where his bold page-one use of a photograph by Eddie Adams of the execution of a Vietcong suspect by Nyugen Ngoc Loan became one of the Vietnam War's most enduring images. Morris, who also served as the first executive editor for the Magnum photojournalist press agency, looks back at his career in this lively memoir. Among the colleagues who turn up in anecdotes are Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lee Miller, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Capa; the book leads with a grainy Capa photograph of the D-day landing, 1 of only 11 shots that survived a freak accident in the London photo labs of Life as Morris and his team raced against the clock to get images to America in time for the next issue. There are over 100 other powerful photographs, taken at the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, the Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek, and the front lines of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, and other locales. In addition to being a dynamic storyteller, Morris is also steadfast in his determination that photojournalists should be given the freedom--both in resources and lack of censorship--to provoke us into a new awareness of what is happening in the world. --Ron Hogan


From Publishers Weekly
"Photographers are the most adventurous of journalists. They have to be. Unlike a reporter, who can piece together a story from a certain distance, a photographer must... be in the right place at the right time. No rewrite desk will save him." Morris wasn't on the front line, he was the guy who sent the photographers out and decided on what came back. And he did it for the best in the business. In this enlightening memoir, Morris traces his half-century career from the mail room at Life, and subsequent promotions there, to Ladies' Home Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times, and as executive editor at the famed Magnum photo agency. Morris worked with and knew as friends the greats of photojournalism, from W. Eugene Smith to the Turnley brothers. His colorful anecdotes have the authenticity of the insider, and photo buffs will finally learn how three rolls of Robert Capa's D-Day film was ruined, leaving only 11 usable shots. Morris also describes his own run-ins with such powerful bosses as Katharine Graham, Henry Luce and A.M. Rosenthal. His book is at its best when he is at the picture desk, making the later chaptersAafter he moves to Paris in 1983 to become a writer and criticAseem much less interesting. Morris could have said more on, say, the impact of newspaper color on photojournalism, but it's enough that he offers a behind-the-scenes look at the glory days before the immediacy of television changed the purpose and impact of the field. And of course, it's supplemented by 115 b&w photos. (June) and Flash!: The Associated Press Covers the World (Abrams).Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Morris deserves to be better known by all who love good documentary and news photography. He has led or worked at some of the defining illustrated news magazines (Life, Ladies' Home Journal, and the New York Times Magazine) and media empires of the 20th century, worked closely with the best photographers of our times (Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Cartier Bresson, "Chim" Seymour, George Rodger, and Lee Miller), and now tells the story of how our century's most powerful photographs came to be made. His inside stories about photographers, editors, and publishers are told here for the first time. Morris describes himself as a journalist and picture editor, not a reporter or photographer. He writes in a forthright and engaging style about his experiences in war and peace with the photographers who created the enduring visual records of the second half of this century. Readers will be grateful that he has finally put his rich memories on paper. Highly recommended, especially for photography and photojournalism collections.AKathleen Collins, Bank of America Archives, San FranciscoCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Rosemary Ranck
...an engaging and informative tale.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Leslie Cockburn
In Get the Picture, we are treated to an extraordinary collection of photographs....


From Kirkus Reviews
A straightforward journalistic memoir by a photo editor responsible for assigning and publishing some of the defining images of the past half-century. Morris has a clear-eyed, detached perspective on his former role as one of the key arbiters of taste for such publications as Life, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. ``The picture editor,'' he writes, ``is the voyeur's voyeur, the person who sees what the photographers themselves have seen, but in the bloodless realm of contact sheets, proof prints, and yellow boxes of slides.'' His self-effacing description aside, Morris was much more than a voyeur during his long careerhe was one of a handful of top picture editors with the power to shape Americans' collective memory of world events, from the London air raids of WWII to school desegregation in Little Rock. Morris discovered his profession in an era when making a deadline still meant that a photo editor would drive at breakneck speed through twisting streets of some foreign land, ditch his car by the side of the road, and run to deliver film to an international carrier. Morris did all that and more, championing the images of such photographers as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David ``Chim'' Seymour, George Rodger, Elliott Erwitt, and Eugene Smith. They were, to him, ``the most adventurous of journalists,'' he writes. ``Unlike a reporter, who can piece together a story from a certain distance, a photographer must get onto the scene of the action . . . nothing must stand between him and reality.'' Although Morris does consciously acknowledge his own role as ``a fixer of `reality' and `history,' '' he still sees his profession with an unjaded eye, and rarely questions the reality he was trying to fix. Although lively, Morris's book is nothing more profound than a recitation of events and anecdotes; he only rarely steps back to reflect on the practice of photojournalism in what was, admittedly, its Golden Age. (90 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
How do photojournalists get the pictures that bring us the action from the world's most dangerous places? How do picture editors decide which photos to scrap and which to feature on the front page?

Find out in Get the Picture, a personal history of fifty years of photojournalism by one of the top journalists of the twentieth century. John G. Morris brought us many of the images that defined our era, from photos of the London air raids and the D-Day landing during World War II to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He tells us the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures like these, which are reproduced in this book, and provides intimate and revealing portraits of the men and women who shot them, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith. A firm believer in the power of images to educate and persuade, Morris nevertheless warns of the tremendous threats posed to photojournalists today by increasingly chaotic wars and the growing commercialism in publishing, the siren song of money that leads editors to seek pictures that sell copies rather than those that can change the way we see the world.





From the Inside Flap
How do photojournalists get the pictures that bring us the action from the world's most dangerous places? Find out in Get the Picture, a personal history of fifty years of photojournalism by one of the top journalists of the twentieth century. John G. Morris brought us many of the images that defined our era, from photos of the London air raids and the D-Day landing during World War II to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He tells us the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures like these, which are reproduced in this book, and provides intimate and revealing portraits of the men and women who shot them, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith.



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