Seeing the past in a different light

Using thousands of photos predominantly from the Getty Archive, and also others in the public domain, Amaral and Jones managed to narrow things down to a collection of 200 photos dating back to the earliest days of mass photography, to tell a new history of the modern world, in a book that has proved to be hugely popular with book buyers, reviewers, and historians alike.

Right from the outset, they were both determined to tell history in a slightly different way.

"So often, it's hard to tell a historical story accurately because, particularly when you're dealing with things like wars, too many of the images are just from one side," she said. "It's definitely harder to achieve a balance between both sides, but that's what we wanted to do - and we also wanted to make sure it was a truly world view of history, not just looking at the usual European colonial or US-dominated view."

Jones said that another challenge they, and indeed all historians, faced was the changing nature of what was considered important and worthy of recording over the years.

"Some of the early photographs of the Crimean War in the 1850s look wonderful and are great documentary pictures, but they're all very bloodless and clean - they're pure propaganda, and it's the same with photos of the American Civil War when so many of the best photographers were all on the side of the Union forces," he said.

"Also, because of the cost and technology involved, in the early days many photographs were of the rich and famous, because that's what people cared about. Now we're more interested in the history of the everyday and normal people's lives, and the further you go back, the harder it gets to find documentary records of any kind about these people."