The book by the British writer and art critic John Burger (b. 1926), specially compiled by the author for Russian readers, includes essays from different years devoted to photography, the principles of the functioning of the post-war art system, as well as some important cultural figures of the 20th century from Mayakovsky to Le Corbusier. The texts, mostly written in the 1960s, contain both reactions to the events of that time (the death of Che Guevara, the publication of Susan Sontag's book On Photography) and more universal works on the theory and history of art (The Moment of Cubism, Historical function of a museum"), which have not lost their relevance to this day.