Best Photography Theory and Criticism Books
Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms
Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images
Photography Theory
The Photography Reader
How to Read a Photograph: Understanding, Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographer
How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers
Another Way of Telling
Basic Critical Theory for Photographers
Photography: A Critical Introduction
Photography: The Key Concepts
Top 10
1. Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms
From its origins at the end of the 1830s, photography has never ceased to evolve both aesthetically and technologically. The past decade has given rise to the new age of digital photography, so Looking at Photographs, first published in 1991, has been revised and updated to define and illustrate terms from the earliest processes to this new technology. At once a rich and informative glossary and a history of the medium, this fully illustrated guide will be…»
2. Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images
This brief text is designed to help both beginning and advanced students of photography better develop and articulate thoughtful criticism. Organized around the major activities of criticism (describing, interpreting, evaluating, and theorizing), Criticizing Photographs provides a clear framework and vocabulary for students' critical skill development. The fourth edition includes new black and white and color images, updated commentary, a completely…»
3. Photography Theory
Photography Theory presents forty of the world's most active art historians and theorists, including Victor Burgin, Joel Snyder, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Trachtenberg, Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Squiers, Margaret Iversen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau in animated debate on the nature of photography. Photography has been around for nearly two centuries, but we are no closer to understanding what it is. For some people, a photograph is an optically accurate impression…»
4. The Photography Reader
The Photography Reader is a comprehensive introduction to theories of photography, its production, uses and effects. Including articles by photographers, from Edward Weston to Jo Spence, as well as key thinkers like Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin and Susan Sontag, essays trace the development of ideas about photography. Each thematic section features an editor's introduction setting ideas and debates in their historical and theoretical context.»
5. How to Read a Photograph: Understanding, Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographer
Ian Jeffrey is a superb guide in this profusely illustrated introduction to the appreciation of photography as an art form. Novices and experts alike will gain a deeper understanding of great photographers and their work, as Jeffrey decodes key images and provides essential biographical and historical background. Profiles of more than 100 major photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand and…»
6. How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers
Ian Jeffrey is a superb guide in this profusely illustrated introduction to the appreciation of photography as an art form. Novices and experts alike will gain a deeper understanding of great photographers and their work, as Jeffrey decodes key images and provides essential biographical and historical background. Profiles of more than 100 major photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Lazlo…»
7. Another Way of Telling
Photographs don't lie--or do they? Two of our most thoughtful and eloquent interrogators of the visual examine the ambiguities of what is seemingly our most straightforward art form. ANOTHER WAY OF TELLING explores the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between picture and viewer, and between the filmed moment and memories it resembles.»
8. Basic Critical Theory for Photographers
If you want to understand the key debates in photography and learn how to apply the fascinating issues raised by critical theory to your own practical work, this is the book for you! This accessible book cuts through often difficult and intimidating academic language to deliver understandable, stimulating discussion and summaries of the original texts. Key works by great writers such as Sontag and Barthes are explored, along with those from other prominent…»
9. Photography: A Critical Introduction
Photography: A Critical Introduction was the first introductory textbook to examine key debates in photographic theory and place them in their social and political contexts, and is now established as one of the leading textbooks in its field. Written especially for students in further and higher education and for introductory college courses, this fully revised edition provides a coherent introduction to the nature of photographic seeing. This revised and…»
10. Photography: The Key Concepts
Since its introduction nearly 200 years ago, photography has become part of everyday life, a position consolidated by the recent development of digital imaging and manipulation. Used to confirm identity, to sell products, to reshape the real, to visualize the news, to record and communicate the personal moment, and as an art form in its own right, photography is now one of the most accessible and pervasive of media. Photography: The Key Concepts provides…»
Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative
The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry
Photography and Culture Volume 1 Issue 2
Photography and Culture Volume 2 Issue 2
Photography and Culture Volume 3 Issue 1
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11. Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative
How are photographs understood as narratives? In this book twenty-two original critical essays tackle this overarching question in a series of case studies moving chronologically across the history of photography from the 1840s to the twenty-first century. The contributors explore the intersections of photography with history, memory, autobiography, time, death, mapping, the discourse of Orientalism, digital technology, and representations of race and…»
12. The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry
Quietly but implacably, powerful transnational corporations are gaining power over our visual world. A 'global, visual content industry' increasingly controls images supplied to advertisers, marketers and designers, yet so far the process has, paradoxically, evaded the public eye. This book is the first to expose the interior workings of the visual content industry, which produces approximately 70% of the images that define consumer cultures. The corporate…»
13. Photography and Culture Volume 1 Issue 2
Photography and Culture is a vehicle for the best critical, reflective and analytical writing on photography, extending a lineage that reaches back through Sontag, Barthes, and Benjamin through to Baudelaire, Fox Talbot and Lady Eastlake. It is pluralistic in its approach and truly inter-disciplinary. It embraces the historic and the contemporary, and is independent of any one prevailing theoretical critical model. It seeks to become the essential text for…»
14. Photography and Culture Volume 2 Issue 2
Photography and Culture is a vehicle for the best critical, reflective and analytical writing on photography, extending a lineage that reaches back through Sontag, Barthes, and Benjamin through to Baudelaire, Fox Talbot and Lady Eastlake. It is pluralistic in its approach and truly inter-disciplinary. It embraces the historic and the contemporary, and is independent of any one prevailing theoretical critical model. It seeks to become the essential text for…»
15. Photography and Culture Volume 3 Issue 1
Photography and Culture is in the forefront of new critical, reflective and analytical writing on photography. It is pluralistic in its approach, inter-disciplinary, embracing the historic and the contemporary and independent of any one prevailing theoretical critical model. It mirrors and debates new ways of thinking about photography as the photographic image becomes an ever more central player in our personal and public histories and lifestories. It…»