From the first famous reportages of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, determined to unmask child labour and the pockets of poverty in early twentieth-century America, to war photographers such as Don McCullin and great interpreters of contemporary society such as Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who often challenged conventions and prejudice and used the camera to bring light where there was too much shadow. Since its birth in the first half of the nineteenth century photography has turned its lens on social issues, becoming the favoured tool for telling hardship and degradation, hidden dramas, the mistreatment, neglect and abuse of children and women: the dark sides of our civil society.