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Product Details

Amazon Sales Rank: #31444 in Books

Published on: 2004-10-01

Released on: 2004-10-01

Original language: English

Number of items: 1

Binding: Hardcover

504 pages

Amazon.com Review
Through the years, National Geographic magazine's staff photographers have often elevated stock depictions of "exotic" cultures into haunting glimpses of other lives. In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits presents a century of captivating images of ordinary people from around the world--280 photographs of pleasure, grief, stoicism, shyness and sheer endurance. In thoughtful essays, five photographers frankly assess changing notions of authenticity and discuss their own methods of capturing a stranger's personality on the run. In the beginning, the magazine showed people stiffly posed in their native costumes, viewed as anthropological specimens. Advances in camera technology created a greater degree of intimacy and spontaneity. Then came color film, which ushered in an era dominated by corny themes and perkily posed subjects in brightly hued clothing. The 1970s marked a new honesty in portraiture, a willingness to go beyond the superficial to investigate the small moments that make up daily life everywhere.

In Focus draws upon the magazine's complete archives to raise intriguing questions about how editorial choices help define our understanding of the world. For example, in 1981, National Geographic published Sam Abell's elegiac portrait of Rosa--the last of the Yahgan Indians of Terra del Fuego--wreathed in atmospheric smoke against a dark background, in the stately tradition of Edward S. Curtis. We also see one of Abell's unpublished photos of Rosa in her modest home, grimacing as she stands in the blue light of her TV, next to a poster commemorating the restoration of Chile's constitution in 1980. The gallery of portraits in this splendid book includes many memorable faces, from the unnerving grin of the Wodaabe tribesman in Niger (who wears colorful makeup as part of a courtship ritual) to the sunny self-possession of a child in Murmansk who holds up four tiny fingers to indicate her age. Beautiful women abound--they have helped sell the magazine from its earliest days. As the decades go by, people everywhere seem more at ease being photographed. But they remain as fascinating as ever, perhaps because we'll never know what they were thinking when the shutter clicked. —Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly
The prickly political implications of portrait photography are perhaps at their most evident in this hefty (seven pounds) and gorgeously glossy compilation of work by National Geographic photographers. As the frank essays by such photographers as Sam Abell, Jodie Jobb and William Albert Allard beginning each chapter reveal, behind the unthreatening National Geographic cameras lenses, often less-than-admirable mechanisms were at work. Stuart Franklin writes of the editorial pressure on photographers to provide "pictures of pretty girls" to the point where "hundreds of bare-breasted women, all from poorer countries, were published at a time of booming subscription rates." Editor Bendavid-Val writes of National Geographic's propensity for avoiding controversial issues at home in the United States; turmoil has been less thorny to document in faraway places. "The emotional distance was easy to maintain in an age when communication was cumbersome and long-distance travel was uncommon." Still, a photograph of thieves' severed heads on a billboard in China, or even the photograph "Afghan Girl," published in 1985 and arguably National Geographic's most well-known photograph, pierce through this self-imposed emotional shield. Beyond the isolationism and voyeurism is something oddly moving about this collection of 280-plus portraits: it forms a giant mosaic of American identity, a self-portrait composed of how we look at others.
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Customer Reviews

National Geographic Book
Out daughter requested this book for Christmas. She is thrilled with it. The book is beautiful.

Captivatingly Beatiful
In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits is a deeply inspiring collection of images, some spontaneously collected and some organized for the sake of composition illustrating the lives of people around the world. Although some photographs, are composed to make a clean, easy to read picture, many others contain an element of "snapshot" quality, which successfully increases the unprompted spirit within each picture.
This book introduced many different lifestyles to me that I had not previously known about or had the chance to research myself. Some photographs show the pristine beauty in certain rituals, and others, the gritty reality of everyday life.
I am inspired to look farther into the cultures of these people I have just perceived. However politically correct or not, I was still spellbound, particularly by a portrait of an Amish teenager working early in the morning out in the fields of a farm. I wonder what his life is like, where this image was taken and who this person is. The book is only a catalyst, exposing the reader to the lives of people from around the world. Another striking image is of a Japanese Geisha taking a cigarette break from applying her makeup. I wonder how the photographers were able to put themselves in these intimate situations and what they said to the subjects in order for them to take the picture.
Overall, I found In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits to be a book full of vibrant, clear, some shocking, some familiar, and all together beautiful images.

Lost art of bookbinding.
I am used to top quality when buying products of the National Geographic. This book, however, doesn't meet the high standards I've learned to expect.

If we think of the multitude of amazing photographs NG printed, owns, distributes... the content of this book are very mediocre in comparison. Yes, there are a lot of fine photos but there are too many 'blah, so what' ones too.

Still, for this price, it is a very good deal, to get a giant hardcover full of photographs in colour.

And here comes the biggest drawback of the book: the brand new hardcover simply fell apart in my hands the first time I opened the book. The book is too big and heavy for the lame method of attaching the body of the book to the cover they used.

I pray NG rediscovers the lost art of fine bookbinding.