Century is a wonderful compilation that deserves great praise for the amount of research and hard work it took to bring to fruition, but for all that it still falls short in some of its reproduction quality. Given that it's billed as being a history of the 20th century in photographs, it also lacks a lot of the pictures most people would instantly recall - like Joe Rosenthal's flag-raising at Iowa Jima, Nik Uts's picture of the naked girl after napalm bombing in Vietnam or Harry Leder's photo of John F. Kennedy junior saluting his father's coffin.
It is a very large book containing 1,100 pictures, each with an historical background text and a detailed index reference. For Bruce Bernard, former picture editor of the Sunday Times magazine, who edited Century, it constitutes an incredible achievement. To have gathered so many images from so many sources is an astonishing feat. His great love of the visual image is evident throughout this massive tome : it weighs six kilos.
Despite my earlier reservation about some areas of quality and content, it is nonetheless a wonderful production full of memorable images, many of which I have not seen before. It's incredible value and will make a great Christmas present for anyone who appreciates both pictures and history.
Given that there are several pictures for every year of the century, picking one that stood out was nearly impossible. I choose this haunting image by Dilip Mehta of Contact Press Images of a child buried after the gas leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984. It was the world's worst industrial disaster, responsible for the death of 2,500 people, and, like so many of today's catastrophic news stories, it horrified the world the day it happened, but is now all but wiped from our minds by other, more recent disasters.
Dermot O Shea is Picture Editor of The Irish Times
Dilip Mehta's photograph of a child buried after the gas leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984