Bruce Bernard was the leading picture editor of his generation, celebrated for his visual taste, knowledge and judgement of photography. His thirty-year career culminated in the remarkable award-winning book `Century`, published by Phaidon in 1999. In the 1990s he was commissioned by a private client to assemble a photographic collection ,and set about acquiring a selection of images that represented, to his unique eye, the best work in the medium from the whole history of photography, ranging from nineteenth-century pioneers like Muybridge and Fox Talbot to giants of the twentieth century like Andr Kertsz, Man Ray, Brassai and Robert Frank. These one hundred photographs are the result; he does not attempt to cover every period or every notable artist, but rather includes only images that truly stimulated and satisfied, and which seemed to him capable of permanently continuing to do so - classics. This is a unique collection that captures, as Bernard himself put it, some of the magic of the medium, its uncanny life-preserving qualities and unique perceptions.