Documentary photographers explore the crucial issues and events of our time. Building on the traditions and passions of their predecessors, they are devising new strategies to address the obstacles and opportunities created by rapid media changes and intensified cross-cultural contact. Witness in Our Time traces the recent history of social documentary photography in the words of twenty-two of the genre's best photographers, editors, and curators, showing that the profession remains vital, innovative, and committed to social change.Several of the photographers narrate dramatic personal odysseys. Eugene Richards discusses the balance between too much and too little empathy in talking to twelve-year-old prostitutes while covering a drug-ravaged Brooklyn neighborhood. For Peter Magubane, a black South African who risked his life to document apartheid, the five years he was banned from working were more painful than nineteen months of beatings and solitary confinement. Donna Ferrato, who began photographing domestic violence while working on a story about love for Japanese Playboy, shows how her photographs have tangibly helped the victims. Known for photographing the uncovered graves of murdered American nuns in El Salvador, Susan Meiselas describes a new website that celebrates the history and culture of Kurdistan. Sebastiao Salgado, who has recently completed a long-term project on refugees, emphasizes the importance of connecting subject and audience, no matter how wide the cultural gulf between them.Illustrated with a compelling image from each photographer and discussing how documentary photographs are created and distributed, Witness in Our Time provides an insider's view of aprofession that continues to confront questions of art and truth while extending the definitions of both.
