Introduction to Black and white photography year. Black and white photography is a fascinatingly diverse, ever-changing, self-renewing phenomenon. During every year since it was invented in the 1820s there have been advances in technology and, almost as frequently, changes in esthetic attitudes and styles. Black and white photographers never cease to find new ways of taking pictures and, in doing so, they incite designers and engineers to come up with new and more sophisticated black and white films, black and white cameras and other equipment. Further more, black and white photographers are continually surprising even themselves with fresh insights and forms of expression with the equipment already at hand. Black and white photography is a field in which so much happens so fast that a continuing record is needed to chart its progress. That is the purpose of BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY YEAR: to keep abreast of the latest and most important developments, both the technical and the artistic, and to present a report on them annually. The year 1972, which this edition covers, was an especially busy and fruitful one. Some remarkable advances were made in black and white cameras and camera equipment. Major exhibitions evoked new interest in the work of black and white photographers as disparate in styles as those of the venerable Paul Strand and the late Diane Arbus. More important black and white photographic books were published than in any previous year. New galleries, dedicated expressly to showing and selling black and white photographs, were opened in Rome and Vancouver, New York and Coconut Grove, Florida. And, as in every year, a number of new black and white photographers were on the brink of recognition; BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY YEAR made a special effort, with the aid of a distinguished panel of consultants, to find the best of them and to publish a careful and representative sampling of their work. In reporting these and other events BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY YEAR has called on the help and expertise of the black and white photographers and laboratory technicians of LIFE, the worldwide services of the Time-Life news bureaus, and the extensive experience of the editorial staff that produced the LIFE Library of Black and white photography. With these resources it has been possible to produce not simply a compendium of black and white photographs taken during 1972, but text-and-picture articles that probe the deeper meaning of events and discuss the implications that many of them portend. Thus, while the primary purpose of BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY YEAR is to report annually on recent and topical happenings, the book is also intended to be a reference work of lasting value. The Editors