The second volume in the Skira Photography series serving as a major reference in the field. The fifty years of artistic and mass photography taken into consideration in this volume are unquestionably the most important in the twentieth century. The acceleration of technological progress, the advent of the era of the machine and the metropolis, the epoch-making economic crisis, the dramatic aftermath of the collapse of the old nineteenth-century order in Europe with political upheavals, wars, revolutions, and dictatorships, the first appearance of a mass society capable of expressing cultures and systems of communication in line with its needs: these are the most obvious stages of a history that was also recorded as it happened, in various forms and media. Among these, key importance certainly attaches to photography. This richly illustrated book--complete with synoptic tables and glossary--offers a wide-ranging survey of this era that will delight and inform a constantly growing audience.