Published by Phaidon Press in 1994, *Humanity and Inhumanity* surveys the long career of George Rodger, from his early work as a BBC stills photographer to the assignments that established him as a major photojournalist. Its 320 pages bring together the defining strands of a practice shaped by war, displacement and sustained attention to people living through extreme circumstances.

Rodger became a stringer for *Life* during the London Blitz in 1940, then photographed across the African, Middle Eastern and Asian theatres of the Second World War. The liberation of Bergen-Belsen marked a decisive point: for the first days he was the only photographer present, and his pictures helped disclose the reality of the camps to a wider public. Their historical gravity rests alongside Rodger’s persistent concern with the individuality of those before his camera.

After co-founding Magnum, Rodger turned toward what he understood as a recovery of humanity. In 1948 he travelled overland from Cape Town to Cairo, photographing communities across Africa and redirecting his work away from the battlefields that had defined the preceding decade. The book’s title therefore describes more than a contrast of subjects. It identifies the central tension of Rodger’s career: photography as witness to organized cruelty, and as an encounter with human presence beyond catastrophe.

The volume frames that trajectory through Bruce Bernard’s reflections on successive phases of Rodger’s life and work, with a foreword by fellow Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. For collectors of documentary photography, wartime photojournalism or Magnum history, its importance lies in this sustained career view. Rather than isolating celebrated images from their circumstances, the monograph places wartime evidence and postwar work within one biographical and ethical continuum, allowing Rodger’s changing purposes—and the burdens placed upon the documentary image—to be considered together.