A naked and terrified Vietnamese girl runs out of a cloud of napalm. A suited man falls head-first from the collapsing World Trade Center. A hooded figure hangs lifelessly in an Abu Ghraib prison cell.
Photographs have a way of sticking with us long after we first see them. Images linger in a much more visceral way than words do.
Images saturate book profits the contemporary world in a way that was never imagined back when photography involved heavy cameras on tripods and unsmiling subjects standing immobile for minutes on end.
Once trusted to capture reality and truth, photographs now