Photography : a cultural history

Each of the eight chapters in this book takes a timeframe of between 15 and nearly 40 years in which to examine the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media, and individual practitioners.

These broad topics work alongside a fully developed cultural context in which the emphasis is more on key ideas than individuals.

There are debates such as the nature of invention, the effect of mass media on morality, the use of imagery as a tool of Western colonialism, and the role of the photograph in advertising, radical politics, and family life. "Focus" boxes highlight interesting cultural or controversial issues, for example "Photography and Futurism" and "Lewis Carroll's Photographs of Children." The author also pays close attention to how contemporary practitioners, commentators, and beholders have talked about specific works, the nature of photography, and the photographer's changing role in society.In addition to representing the established canon of Europe and the United States, the book benefits from two decades of research into non-Western photography and yields rarely seen work from Latin America, Africa, India, Russia, China, and Japan.

Great names from the world over are well represented: Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Gustave Le Gray, Peter Magubane, Don McCullin, Alexandr Rodchenko, Cindy Sherman, Raghubir Singh, William Henry Fox Talbot, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston.

Additionally, featured in more detail in "Portrait" boxes are photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Mathew Brady, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Kasebier, Jacob Riis, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, and Shomei Tomatsu.