The New York Times Magazine Photographs

This anthology gathers more than 250 photographs commissioned over three decades by The New York Times Magazine, edited by its longtime director of photography, Kathy Ryan, with a preface by former editorial director Gerald Marzorati.

Four sections cover reportage, portraiture, style, and conceptual photography, including photo-illustration. Each image sits next to the original printed tear sheet, so a reader can see it against its magazine context: cropping, sequencing, the surrounding text. The photographer list runs from photojournalists Gilles Peress, Sebastião Salgado, and Paolo Pellegrin to studio and fashion photographers Gregory Crewdson, Nadav Kander, Ryan McGinley, and Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Short texts from photographers, writers, and editors take up what separates documentary photojournalism from staged or conceptual work.

Ryan's tenure at the Magazine made it a place where fine-art photography and photojournalism ran on the same pages, often through commissions that pushed photographers past their usual assignments. This 2011 Aperture volume is her record of that editorial run; a companion exhibition, curated with Lesley Martin, toured Rencontres d'Arles, Foam Amsterdam, and Aperture Gallery in New York.