Lewis Hine, Sebastião Salgado, Eugene Smith, Tom Stoddart, Igor Kostin, Philip Jones Griffiths: documentary photographers who dealt with hunger, drought, ecological disasters and AIDS, turning their cameras on hidden stories that had to be brought to light, told, understood and denounced. Their work helped make the violation of human rights a common awareness and a public discourse, contributing to our civil culture. The book gathers 20 protagonists and 20 exemplary stories of documentary photography, each with an introductory text and a careful selection of pictures: from the late nineteenth-century America in which Jacob Riis tried to show "how the other half lives" to Lucinda Devlin’s recent pictures of the execution rooms, the Omega Suites, of American prisons.