Reuters presents the 500 most impactful photographs of the last 40 years in a new book

Over the last four decades, news agency Reuters have covered major events, spanning the Tank Man at Tiananmen Square to the 2008 financial crisis and Princess Diana's funeral. Now, In the Moment: 40 Years of Reuters Photojournalism unites 500 key images, shown alongside text telling the story behind the picture.

Since its launch in 1851, Reuters’ team of photographers around the world has grown exponentially, with its network now delivering 1,500,000 photographs annually. Alexia Singh, former Reuters Picture Editor and current Senior Lecturer in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communications, has sifted through the vast archive to present the most iconic recent images.

Divided into decades, the book begins in the 1980s, when photography encompassed film, mechanical cameras, chemical baths and landlines. Photographers were almost exclusively male (now one-third of Reuters photographers are female, according to the organisation) and images were heavily restricted in where and when they could be shared, in contrast to the sharp immediacy of today’s culture.

In the Moment: 40 Years of Reuters Photojournalism isn’t a chronological retelling of history so much as a curation of impactful photography. There is Pulitzer Prize winning photography here, but also the slow documenting of a world on the brink of massive change, marked by the end of the Cold War, the opening up of Eastern Europe, and the boom of financial markets and the dawning of a new, digital era.

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