Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism

In his long and distinguished career as a journalist and picture editor, John G. Morris had one simple--and stunningly complex--assignment: Get the picture. "Picture editors," Morris writes, "are the unwitting (or witting, as the case may be) tastemakers, the unappointed guardians of morality, the talent brokers, the accomplices to celebrity. Most important--or disturbing--they are the fixers of 'reality' and of 'history.'" Indeed, Morris commissioned, edited, and published the photos that have helped define our sense of recent history, and he worked closely with some of the century's great photographers, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith. Get the Picture is Morris's fascinating account of a half century of photojournalism, from Capa's heroism on D-Day to the special ethical problems that arose for photographers and their editors on the night Princess Diana died in a Paris tunnel while trying to avoid the paparazzi.
Beginning with the ascendancy of Life magazine during World War II, Morris offers the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures, and intimate portraits of the men and women who took them, along with colorful anecdotes about his encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, General George S. Patton, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Lee Miller, Andrei Sakharov, and many others. Morris has a few opinions as well about his powerful bosses--Henry Luce of Time Inc., Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, and A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times--and he reflects, often humorously, on his triumphs and losses inside various media empires. He observes how the press failed to tell the story of the Holocaust, and how it turned away in revulsion from images of what the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to the human body. In addition, Morris details how The Washington Post fell for the Johnson administration's lies about the Tonkin Gulf "incident," and he notes how The New York Times initially missed its significance.
Get the Picture is also a book about lasting friendships and the importance of professional and personal commitment under impossible circumstances. Morris writes movingly about the tragic deaths of his colleagues Robert Capa, Werner Bischof, David "Chim" Seymour, and W. Eugene Smith, and about what was required to carry on without them. Above all, Get the Picture is about a life vigorously lived, and Morris is still going strong as one of the leading proponents of a journalism committed to the unflinching, unblinking truth.

115 black-and-white photographs