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“The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age”

photos of Earthrise taken from Apollo 8, a woman and a child underneath a sign reading 'colored entrance', and Tank Man in Tiananmen Square

A group of photographers, editors, and curators recently convened to choose a list of “the 25 most significant photographs since 1955”. Choosing just 25 photos to represent 70 years of the richest visual era in human history is just an impossible task, so there’s bound to be some grousing about individual choices. (I love Beyoncé but really?) But the selection is fascinating, includes a few images I’d never seen before, and the accompanying discussion is worth reading.

I would love to see a process that asks for nominations across a
larger & broader range of folks and then whittle it down through ranked choice voting or pairwise ranking. Paging The Pudding

Comments  2

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Nicolas Magand

Good selection, but i find it extremely USA-centric without having the article acknowledging it.

Gregory Todd Williams

It's wild that they would list Ed Ruscha's Sunset Strip photographs as helping to define the modern age, and miss linking to Getty's amazing interactive presentation of those photographs.

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