It’s a simple question, but there’s no simple answer--indeed, each of the 280 photographs in this wonderful book offers its own, unique answer, distilling subject, setting, and creative skill into a single arresting moment that captures the viewer’s imagination. And though we may find this elusive quality hard to define, we recognize it immediately and instinctively.

William Albert Allard, one of the essayists in the book, writes, “A fine portrait has the potential to tell something about the spirit of the subject that can be sensed by someone half a world and a different language away. [It says] something universal and simple: This is another person in our world and I’d like you to meet him.or her.”

Every great portrait speaks for itself. Its tone may be dignified or defiant, confrontational or conspir- atorial, elusive or evocative--but whatever its mood, it addresses the viewer directly, a visual declaration whose power is immediate and unmis- takable. It seems simple, yet it is not.

Each photograph in this magnificent collection stands proudly on its own; taken together, they tell a much more complex and subtle story of an ever-evolving art form in constant, creative response to new technologies, new eras, and new ideas. Though decades separate them, there’s an obvious kinship between, say, an Edward Curtis portrait of a 19th- century Native American and Steve McCurry’s arresting 1984 image of an Afghan refugee girl, but equally as fascinating is the way each of them reflects its own time and also changes how we see what came before. Such suggestive, provocative juxta- positions abound in these pages, eloquently explored in the text by Leah Bendavid-Val and five of our finest contemporary photographers: Sam Abel, Stuart Franklin, Jodi Cobb, William Albert Allard, and David Alan Harvey.

  Spanning well over a century, In Focus is divided into periods that correspond roughly to changes in photographic equipment and techniques; from the cumbersome cameras and long exposures of early days to the advent of color film and the light-weight, versatile modern gear that fostered a new, informal spontaneity in portraiture. The book traces the evolving roles and goals of photographers themselves, and offers revealing insights on how their work both reflects and influences how we see ourselves and our world.

But in the end,,it is the pictures--280 in all, by many of the greatest photographers ever to peer through a lens--that tell the tale, in page after page of arresting images. And as Chris Johns observes in his Foreword, “To capture the spirit and essence of another human being is a challenge beyond measure, but when it happens--the creation brings joy.”

Foreword

National Geographic Portraits

Before 1930

The Strange and the Exotic

1930s-1940s

Away from Depression and War

1950s- 1960s

Cheerful Kodachrome Days

1970s-1980s

Back to Realism

1990s-Present

Photo qraphv and Ambiauitv