BEING THERE

The elements of Being There have become fragments of biographies that collectively follow the progress of picture journalism from the advent of the miniature camera through to the arrival and impact of the digital age. It covers a ninety-year period from ca.1923 to 2012 and provides a critical compilation of encounters with influential photographers and their visual icons. It introduces snatches of life; the individual photographer’s biographies, the biography of the subject of the photographer’s gaze and to some extent the biography of the observer who intercepts the photographer and extends the story. This is not a history of modern photojournalism but a meander through the media’s past, just stopping at strategic points to mark in the detail and paint in the colour.

The predominant narrative to this book relates to the photographic documentary in Europe and America and the individual interviews reflect this. Many of these interviews have been published in the photographic press and are reproduced here in edited or expanded form, while others have been interviewed specifically for this book. They cover five periods: 1923-1940 with the emergence of the picture magazine; 1940-1975 the golden age of photojournalism and the arrival of the ‘colour supplements’; 1975-2000 which provides new thinking and looking; 2000-2010 that sees the arrival of the democracy of photography; while 2011-2012 reviews concerns and queries, outcomes and polarities of Armageddon and renewal.

Michael Hallett’s publication has evolved over a thirty year period and is now revised and updated and presented from a 2023 perspective. His conversations with such photographers as Tim Gidal, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, Sebastiāo Salgado as well as more recent practitioners all reflect the time of their particular interview. (see the TASTER button below).

A new chapter called Pandemic, is effectively a diary note of COVID-19, from January 2020 until the end of 2022 where for the majority in England, COVID-19 is 'reduced to being seen the rearview mirror'. It is my response to Being There

ISBN: 978-1-3999-4034-8. Softback. 319 pages. £20 plus postage. (UK delivery = £4.69; EU delivery = £11.85 Royal Mail; Rest of World (USA) delivery = £25 Royal Mail).