>>391362350/50, great photos have been picked from good books or published sets but this is done to very bluntly summarize someone's field of work.
Imagine someone who has 2000 decent photos, and his best one is pretty good, now look at someone who has 100 "okay" photos, and his best one is actually great stuff, a lucky strike where he emptied the entire roll in a few seconds with his flagship camera; in a normal publication about them the one with the smaller and more average work will be seen as the superior one despite knowers knowing the other guy is vastly better.
The "banger" shot is important but it also depends on your public, if you want to sell snake oil then sure, go for the banger, study a situation or possibility in which you might, sooner or later, get it but you won't replicate such thing when demanded. A more self-paced photog will pull decent results consistently but might not be able to get the banger for years or even decades.
Also people are cattle, dumb as circular bricks, and will always pick the image with a person rather than a good composition. For example MrCurry has great photographs but a rather simple portrait with a girl with great eyes is his most famous work, an example of a good photograph of an outstanding subject rather than an outstanding photograph of a good subject. Galen Rowell is another example, his Rainbow Tibetan Castle is great but has rather uninteresting colors and shadow game other than the rainbow itself, but you have his Horse Race in a Mountain or his Twilight Lake which are superior compositions but rarely get a mention, why? because people are gorilla nigger cattle who don't actually look at books, they look at a single image that represents the entire field of someone and also look for the rare instance rather than an exemplary case of the photog's tastes.
Final example, Ricky Carioti, acclaimed photojournalist who has traveled all over the world: His entire career is this picture, taken outside his office.
