Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism 1839-1973 [Hardcover]

Robert Lebeck approaches photojournalism in a different way from other books on the subject, rather than show photos out of page context he has filled his fascinating book with the very spreads and pages that readers saw when they bought the magazines. You can see the pages (a lot smaller than the originals and with the white paper printed as a light sepia) with the headlines, intros, columns of text and of course the photos. The material comes from the author's huge collection of European and American news magazines, eighty-three are featured, starting with The Illustrated London News (I was the Art Editor of this publication in the late Sixties) from 1871 through to the Sunday Times from 1973.

Lebeck has selected hundreds of spreads to show how photojournalism developed but I think he has concentrated too much on various wars during the last hundred years though I will admit that these conflicts do give photographers the chance to show readers, at home, something that they would have no chance (or want) to experience. Amongst all the conflicts there are plenty examples of magnificent photojournalism, Eugene Smith's famous 1951 Spanish Village photo story from `Life' magazine, here you can see how the ten pages were laid out rather than one or two photos from the seventeen used that most other photo books would use, the 1933 `USSR in Construction' magazine devoted forty pages to the construction of the White Sea Canal with photography by Alexander Rodchenko, twenty-two of these are shown with brilliant layouts also by Rodchenko, as well as filming the 1936 Olympics Leni Riefenstahl took the photos featured on nine pages from the famous French `L'Illusration' magazine.

The book is beautifully printed and laid out, basically in German but each of the nine chapters has the same text in English and all the captions are in both languages (unfortunately the English captions are in grey type which is a bit hard to read) but what is not translated (why not?) are nineteen pages of biographies of various photographers and photo editors. If this sort of book appeals to you have a look at these two, `Century' by Bruce Bernard, a monumental news-photo collection in over eleven hundred pages. `Life' magazine, which at its peak was selling eight and a half million copies a week (1968) has plenty of spreads shown in `Kiosk' and more can be seen in `Great Photographic Essays from Life' by Maitland Edey, it has twenty-two of the best photo stories and like `Kiosk' reproduces the actual spreads but here they are the same size as they originally appeared. The Spanish Village is included and also the other famous photo Smith essay, Country Doctor from 1948.

`Kiosk' is a wonderful collection of photo stories and the author hopes to do a second volume covering photo books, like Robert Frank's 1958 `The Americans' or Dorothea Lange's 1939 `An American Exodus', much of what the he might include is shown (nicely as spreads again) in the stunning `The Book of 101 Books: Seminal photographic books of the twentieth century' by Andrew Roth.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

There are some remarkable photos that over years have achieved iconic status. For example, when one thinks of the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa's image of the mortally wounded Republican soldier comes to mind. More recently, some of the photos from Abu Graibh Prison scandal will reach that same level of fame. I have always wondered how amongst the thousands of images of any one event, how a few chosen ones gain iconic status. robert Lebeck's "Kiosk" is the best answer that I have come across.

This book is more a history of the illustrated magazines than it is of photojournalism. It was the news magazines like L'illustration, London Illustrated News, Life, Leslie's Weekly and Colliers that created the demand for photos. In turn, photojournalism developed as a profession to meet their almost insatiable needs for sensational images. It was through this mass marketplace of images that iconic photos percolated up to the top.

Although this is an extremely well done German publication, it is not a scholarly work. The author is a photojournalist and not an academic. Robert Lebeck is essentially an illustrated magazine collector. Through photos of photo magazines, Lebeck visually shows how the illustated magazine changed over time. This book is a great example of the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Lebeck's collection of old illustrated magazines is absolutely fascinating and will enchant all those who purchase this book. Highly recommended.