Introduction: Seeing and believing / Kerry Tremain
Hansel Mieth: the depression and the early days of Life
Walter Rosenblum: Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, and the Photo League
Michelle Vignes: Magnum Photo Agency : the early years
Wayne Miller: World War II and the family of man
Peter Magubane: a black photographer in Apartheid South Africa
Matt Herron: the Civil Rights movement and the Southern documentary project
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City
Mary Ellen Mark: streetwise photographer
Earl Dotter: the United Mine Workers
Eugene Richards: Americans we
Susan Meiselas: Central America and human rights
Sebastião Salgado: workers
Graciela Iturbide: the indigenous of Mexico
Antonin Kratochvil: the fall of the Iron Curtain
Donna Ferrato: living with the enemy : domestic violence
Joseph Rodriguez: in the barrio
Dayanita Singh: a truer India
Fazal Sheikh: portrait of a refugee
Gifford Hampshire: the Environmental Protection Agency's Project DOCUMERICA
Peter Howe: Life magazine and Outtakes
Colin Jacobson: Independent magazine and Reportage
Anne Wilkes Tucker: the museum context
Fred Ritchin: the fish are last to know about the water: the emerging digital revolution
Rondal Partridge: Dorothea Lange in the field
Don McCullin: Vietnam : the Battle of Hue, 1968
Bill Owens: Suburbia and a passion for seeing his world
Larry Fink: Social graces
David Goldblatt: once an enemy : Apartheid and the New South Africa
Maya Goded: Tierra Negra
Afterword: Witness in our time / Ken Light.