The Photography Book

The Library Essay

A Century and a Half, One Frame Each

Phaidon applied its alphabet formula to photography in 1997: five hundred photographers, one image and one page each, from the medium's inventors to working contemporaries, with fashion, war, science and street photography shelved as equals. The single-image constraint is severe and clarifying, forcing each photographer to be represented by one decision, and the A-to-Z order produces the collisions that make the book browsable for years.

Revised in a second edition in 2014, it has served a generation as the widest single-volume introduction to the medium, and its egalitarian structure made an argument that needed making at the time, that photography's history belongs to everyone who pointed a camera well, not only to those the galleries had already admitted.