| 1941 | North America • USA
| Walker Evans and James Agee publish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941). |
| 1943 | North America • USA | Weegee (Arthur Fellig) takes his famous photograph The Critic outside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Published in LIFE magazine on 6 December 1943 it pushes his career forward. |
| 1945 | North America • USA
| Alexey Brodovitch publishes Ballet (New York: J.J. Augustin, 1945). |
| 1945 | North America • USA | André Kertész publishes Day of Paris. |
| 1945 | Europe • Czechoslovakia | Jindrich Styrsky and Jindrich Heisler publish Na jehlach techto dni [On the Needles of these Days]. |
| 1945 | North America • USA | Weegee (Arthur Fellig) publishes Naked City.
Naked City (A Da Capo Paperback) Weegee |  |
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| 1945 | Asia • Iwo Jima
| Joe Rosenthal takes the photograph of the Flag raising on Iwo Jima showing four marines putting up a large flag on Mount Suribachi. It quickly becomes one of the iconic American war photographs.
A feature film Flags of Our Fathers (2006) , directed by Clint Eastwood, retells the story. (23 February 1945) [Read about] |
| 1945 | North America • USA
| V-J Day ended the hostilities of the Second World War and was a time of celebrations for the Allies. The photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt catches the atmosphere of the occasion when anybody could kiss anybody and get away with it. The photograph is fascinating because of the numbers of people who claimed to be the sailor or the nurse involved to learn more about it go to http://www.life.com/Life/special/kiss01.html. (14 August 1945) [Read about] |
| 1945 | Europe • Germany | Yevgeny Khaldei photographs the placing of a Soviet flag on the Reichstag in Berlin showing that the European phase of the Second World War is nearly over. (2 May 1945) [Read about]
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| 1946 | North America • USA | Wright Morris publishes The Inhabitants. |
| 1946 | Europe • Czechoslovakia | Zdenek Tmej publishes Abeceda: Duševního Prázdna [Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness] |
| 1946 | North America • USA | Alfred Stieglitz dies. His role in placing photography amongst the arts and in influencing its direction in the late 19th century and in the first twenty years of the 20th is difficult to overstate. |
| 1947 | North America • USA | Robert Capa publishes Slightly Out of Focus.
Slightly out of Focus Robert Capa |  |
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| 1947 | North America • USA | Edward Weston publishes Fifty Photographs. |
| 1947 | Europe • France | The Magnum photo agency is founded.
Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History: The Story of the Legendary Photo Agency Russell Miller |  |
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| 1948 | North America • USA | Edwin Land introduces the Polaroid camera |
| 1948 | North America • USA | W. Eugene Smith publishes his photo-essay Country Doctor in LIFE magazine in the USA. (20 September 1948) |
| 1948 | Europe • Denmark
| The Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen self-publishes 122 Colour Photographs Copenhagen: Schoenberg, 1948) which embraces the Modernist style and the use of color. This is one of the first books to use color photography effectively. |
| 1949 | Europe • France | Robert Doisneau and Blaise Cendrars publishes La Banlieue de Paris. |
| 1951 | Africa • Southern Africa | In South Africa the magazine 'The African Drum is created by an Africaner (Robert Crisp) after a slow start it becomes The Drum and is culturally important throughout Africa for many years. (March 1951) |