The life of British photographer George Rodger (1908–1995) was rich in adventure. Before he founded MAGNUM Photos in 1947 along with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, and William Vandivert, he worked as a war correspondent for Life magazine in sixty-one different countries.

During the London air strikes, he shot the images that would become emblematic of “The Blitz“. Rodger took the first photos of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after which he turned his back on war photography. In the ensuing years, he traveled twenty-eight thousand miles all across Africa and the Near East taking fascinating, captivatingly beautiful photographs of indigenous peoples and their rituals.

This monograph presents Rodger’s best photographs from 1940 to 1949, key years in the life of a man whose life and work followed the traditions of the great explorers of the nineteenth century.