Including articles by photographers from Edward Weston to Jo Spence, as well as key thinkers like Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin and Susan Sontag, the essays trace the development of ideas about photography. Each themed section features an editor's introduction setting ideas and debates in their historical and theoretical context.Sections include: Reflections on Photography; Photographic Seeing; Coding and Rhetoric; Photography and the Postmodern; Photo-digital; Documentary and Photojournalism; The Photographic Gaze; Image and Identity; Institutions and Contexts.

    Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

    This selection contains many groundbreaking essays and previously uncollected pieces written for exhibitions and catalogues in which Berger probes the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith - and the lives of those photographed - with fierce engagement, intensity and tenderness.The selection is made and introduced by Geoff Dyer, author of the award-winning The Ongoing Moment.How do we see the world around us? This is one of a number of pivotal works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision for ever.

    In this book, Shore explores ways of understanding photographs from all periods and all types - from iconic images to found photographs, from negatives to digital files. This books serves as an indispensable tool for students, teachers and everyone who wants to take better pictures or learn to look at them in a more informed way.

    With characteristic perversity - and trademark originality - THE ONGOING MOMENT is Dyer's unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, roads). In doing so Dyer constructs a narrative in which those photographers - many of whom never met in their lives - constantly come into contact with each other. Great photographs change the way we see the world; THE ONGOING MOMENT changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art.

    Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

    A short illustrated survey of the use of photography in contemporary art since the mid-1980s.

    His trenchant writings on photography and photographers have been collected for this volume from a broad range of magazines, including "Aperture," "Artforum" and "The Nation." In "Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics," Strauss tackles subjects as diverse as "Photography and Propaganda," the imagery of dreams, Sebastiao Salgado's epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. The timely issue of photographic legitimacy is addressed in the essay "Photography and Belief," and in "The Highest Degree of Illusion," Strauss discusses the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11. As our world is shaped more and more by images and their slipperiness, what he calls a media "pandemonium" in its root meaning of "the place of all howling demons," we need a mind and voice like Levi Strauss' to bring clarity to our vision.

    No other book has managed to relate the aesthetic evolution and technical innovations of photography with such an absorbing combination of clarity, scholarship and enthusiasm.

    The Photography Book brings together 500 inspiring, moving and beautiful images of famous events and people, sensational landscapes, historic moments, ground-breaking photojournalism, insightful portraits, sport, wildlife, fashion and the everyday.Following the winning formula of The Art Book and The 20th Century Art Book, The Photography Book is arranged in alphabetical order by photographer offering us a window on the last 150 years as it takes us on a journey through familiar and strange images by great, unknown and innovative photographers from around the world. Each image is discussed in detail, bringing it to life and offering us an understanding of this art form which plays such a large role in our everyday lives.An accessible, informative and easy-to-use guide, The Photography Book brings together an overview of this incredibly rich and diverse medium. A simple system of cross-referencing offers easy access to photographers working with a similar approach or using different means to capture the same subject. Glossaries of technical terms and movements and a directory of museums and galleries where photography is permanently exhibited are also included to provide a fully comprehensive volume.

    The classic 1972 translation by Stanley Mitchell is now available in book form for the first time to mark the 80th Anniversary of the original publication, with a new Introduction by writer and photographer Henry Bond.From the Introduction"Applied as a modus operandi, any intention to demystify or debunk through a rebuttal of idées reçues--conventional wisdom--often emerges directly from everyday life: anthropological field research made on a tram; in a cafe; at an art exhibition; lazing on a mountainside smoking a joint ('My First Impressions of Hashish'); or, as here, whilst perusing a selection of recently published photo-books.""Benjamin's essay was first published in German in three consecutive weekly instalments in the arts-to-politics magazine Literarische Welt, in the Fall of 1931, where it appears as 'Kleine Geschichte der Photographie.' Notwithstanding its appearance in the context of a journalistic, features-led current affairs title, Benjaimin's essay is, I claim--I am bold, but I cannot imagine I am alone in this conclusion--the single most significant essay in the quite slim canon of indispensable photo theory texts: there is no later scholar of photo who has not been influenced by it.""Benjamin's deliberately unassuming 'little' history can and should be opposed to all the grand reference tomes on photography that are packed with so much ('includes more than 3,000 color and black-and-white images,' etc.), but which are ultimately only unwieldy and tedious."

    Over the past ten years it has experienced radical changes, in part due to the rise of digital technologies. Photography is now often engaged in by artists who are not just printing in a darkroom, but using the medium as a single aspect of a larger ouvre, as one of several media under exploration. Vitamin Ph focuses on diverse global developments in 'art' photography through the work of 121 contemporary artists, who were nominated by 78 international critics, curators and artists. These selections will be accompanied by a 5000 word introductory text by TJ Demos, aiming to explore ideas relevant to contemporary photography with reference to the works included in the book. In addition, the work of each photographer/artist will be introduced by a short commissioned text of approximately 500 words. Similar in concept, scope and structure to Vitamin P and Vitamin D, Vitamin Ph presents, in A to Z order, artists who have emerged, or in some instances re-emerged, in the last five years using the medium of photography.

    His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography. Following World War II, he helped found the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. Cartier-Bresson would go on to produce major bodies of photographic reportage, capturing such events as China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the United States in the postwar boom and Europe as its older cultures confronted modern realities. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson--including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work. The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson's career through 300 photographs divided into 12 chapters. While many of his most famous pictures are included, a great number of images will be unfamiliar even to specialists. A wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art. The extensive supporting material--featuring detailed chronologies of the photographer's professional travels and of spreads of his picture stories as they appeared in magazines--will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson's work.

    The chapters focus on description, interpretation, evaluation, and theory and provide a sound b

    There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.