Photography: A Critical Introduction

Cover
Half Title
Endorsement Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
Illustration acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Thinking about photography: Debates, historically and now
Introduction
Aesthetics and technologies
The impact of new technologies
Art and technology
The photograph as document
Photography, modernity and the postmodern
Aesthetic debates now
Contemporary debates
What is theory?
Photography theory
Critical reflections on realism
Reading images
Photography reconsidered
Theory, criticism, practice
Case study: Image analysis: The example of Migrant Mother
Histories of photography
Which founding father?
The photograph as image
History in focus
Photography and social history
Social history and photography
The photograph as testament
Categorical photography
Institutions and contexts
Museums and archives
Chapter 2 Surveyors and surveyed: Photography out and about
Introduction
Documentary and photojournalism: Issues and definitions
Documentary photography
Photojournalism
Photography and war
War and spectacle
Documentary and authenticity
Defining the real in the age of social media
Surveys and social facts
Victorian surveys and investigations
Photographing workers
The construction of documentary
Picturing ourselves
The Farm Security Administration (FSA)
Discussion: Drum
Documentary: New cultures, new spaces
Photography on the streets
Theory and the critique of documentary
Cultural politics and everyday life
The real world in colour
Documentary and photojournalism in the global age
Chapter 3 ‘Sweet it is to scan…’: Personal photographs and popular photography
Introduction
Private lives and personal pictures: Users and readers
In and beyond the charmed circle of the home
The public and the private in personal photography
Beyond the domestic
Portraits and albums
Informality and intimacy
The working classes picture themselves
The Kodak path: Kodak and the mass market
The supersnap in Kodaland
Paths unholy and deeds without a name?
Re-viewing the archive
Autobiography: Exploring childhood
Post-family and post-photography? The digital world and the end of privacy
Change
Continuity
Moment of taking
Moments of viewing and sharing
Moments of organising and reviewing: the role of the archive
And in the galleries…
Chapter 4 The subject as object: Photography and the human body
Introduction
The photographic body in crisis
Embodying social difference
Photography and identification
New dimension: Mattering black lives
Objects of desire and disgust
Objectification, fetishism, voyeurism
The celebrity body
Pornography and sexual imagery
Class and representations of the body
New dimension: #Me 2.0
Technological bodies
The camera as mechanical eye
Interventions and scientific images
The body as machine
Digital imaging and the malleable body
Case study: Materialism and embodiment
New dimension: Seeing textures
The body in transition
Photography, birth and death
Summary
Chapter 5 Spectacles and illusions: Photography and commodity culture
Introduction: The society of the spectacle
Photographic portraiture and commodity culture
Photojournalism, glamour and the paparazzi
Stock photography, image banks and corporate media
Commodity spectacles in advertising photography
The grammar of the ad
Case study: The commodification of human experience – Coca Cola’s Open Happiness Campaign
The transfer and contestation of meaning
Hegemony in photographic representation
Photomontage: Concealing social relations
The fetishisation of labour relations
The gaze and gendered representations
Fashion and tourism
Case study: Tourism, fashion and ‘the Other’
Case study: Self-Orientalisation and the construction of nationhood in the !ncredible India campaign
The context of the image
Image worlds
Case study: Benetton, Toscani and the limits of advertising
Chapter 6 On and beyond the white walls: Photography as art
Introduction
Photography as art
Early debates and practices
The complex relations between photography and art
Photography extending art
Photography claiming a place in the gallery
The modern era
Modernism and Modern Art
Modern photography
Photo-eye: New ways of seeing
Case study: Art, design, politics: Soviet Constructivism
Emphasis on form
American formalism
Case study: Art movements and intellectual currencies: Surrealism
Surrealist photography
Late twentieth-century perspectives
Conceptual art and the photographic
Photography and the postmodern
Women’s photography
Questions of identity
Identity and the multi-cultural
Case study: Landscape as genre
Photography within the institution
Art photography now
Curators, collectors and festivals
Blurring the boundaries
Afterword
Glossary
From analogue to digital
Photography archives
Bibliography
Index