Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.

One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs. It begins with the famous In Plato's Caveessay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching Brief Anthology of Quotations.

Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography--offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this volume, the Webbs share their thoughts about a wide range of practical and philosophical issues, from questions about seeing and being in the world with a camera, to how to shape a complete body of work in a way that's both structured and intuitive. Award-winning novelist Teju Cole, a student of the Webbs, provides the introduction.

PhotoWork is a collection of interviews by forty photographers about their approach to making photographs and, more importantly, a sustained body of work. Curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf was inspired to seek out and assemble responses to these questions after hearing from countless young photographers about how they often feel adrift in their own practice, wondering if they are doing it the right way. The responses, from both established and newly emerging photographers, reveal there is no single path. Their advice is wildly divergent, generous, and delightful: Justine Kurland discusses the importance of allowing a narrative to unravel; Doug DuBois reflects on the process of growing into one's own work; Dawoud Bey evokes musicians such as Miles Davis as his inspiration for never wanting to become my own oldies show. The book is structured through a Proust-like questionnaire, in which individuals are each asked the same set of questions, creating a typology of responses that allows for an intriguing compare and contrast.

Including Robert Adams, Dawoud Bey, Alejandro Cartagena, Elinor Carucci, John Chiara, Kelli Connell, Lois Conner, Matthew Connors, Siân Davey, Doug DuBois, John Edmonds, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paul Graham, Katy Grannan, Gregory Halpern, Curran Hatleberg, Todd Hido, Rinko Kawauchi, Peter Kayafas, Justine Kurland, Gillian Laub, John Lehr, Dana Lixenberg, Andrew Moore, Abelardo Morell, Zora Murff, Catherine Opie, Ed Panar, Matthew Pillsbury, Kristine Potter, Gus Powell, Richard Renaldi, Sasha Rudensky, Lise Sarfati, Bryan Schutmaat, Manjari Sharma, Dayanita Singh, Tiffany Smith, Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, and Vanessa Winship

The Nature of Photographs is an essential primer of how to look at and understand photographs, by one of the world's most influential photographers, Stephen Shore. 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.

In the twenty-first century, photography has come of age as a contemporary art form. Almost two centuries after photographic technology was first invented, the art world has fully embraced it as a legitimate medium, equal in status to painting and sculpture. The Photograph as Contemporary Art introduces the extraordinary range of contemporary art photography, from portraits of intimate life to highly staged directorial spectacles.

Arranged thematically, the book reproduces work from a vast span of photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Barbara Kasten, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Deana Lawson, Diana Markosian, Elle Pérez, Gregory Halpern, Lieko Shiga, Nan Goldin, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Pixy Liao, Susan Meiselas, and Zanele Muholi. This fully revised and updated new edition revitalizes previous discussion of works from the 2000s through dialogue with more recent practice. Alongside previously featured work, Charlotte Cotton celebrates a new generation of artists who are shaping photography as a culturally significant medium for our current sociopolitical climate. A superb resource, The Photograph as Contemporary Art is a uniquely broad and diverse reflection of the field.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

A new edition of Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography--its problems, politics, and possibilities.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.

With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery--to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal--across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written today.

Photography celebrates the most iconic photographs of the past 200 years and includes more than 50 biographies of the most famous photographers, explaining how they pushed the bounds of the medium.It also showcases examples of the extraordinary cameras that photographers experimented with, from the daguerreotype to the latest camera phones!

Charting the influence of social and cultural change, as well as the impact of science and technology, this beautiful book follows the history of photographs from the first grainy attempts at portrait and landscape photography to gritty photojournalism, street photography, and digital photography, with special features delving into the stories behind photographic images that changed how people saw the world.

This fantastic photography book promises:

- A selection of the most important lost cultural artifacts from ancient times to the present day
- Features images of the artworks where available, or specially commissioned illustrations of them based on written accounts
- Includes details of the ongoing debate about whether looted art should be returned to its country of origin

Packed with information and full of inspiration, Photography is the perfect reference for budding photographers, seasoned professionals, and anyone with an interest in the subject. Whether you're looking for a riveting reference book to display on your coffee table or gift to a friend, or you're a life-longer learner with a thirst for knowledge - Photography is sure to delight!

Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography--offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through words and photographs, in this volume Fink reveals insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, from connecting with the subject in front of the lens to shaping a vision that is authentic. Photographer Lisa Kereszi, a student of Larry Fink, provides the introduction.

When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an ecology of images, she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.

Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny's story about the birth of painting to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.

What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?

A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can white artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin's classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.

Gilpin was a New York-trained fine arts photographer who started working with Navajo people when her partner accepted a job as a nurse in Arizona. She spent more than three decades documenting Navajo life and creating her book in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. Framing her lesbian identity and her long relationship with the Navajo people around questions of allyship, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon addresses the long and problematic history of White photographers capturing images of Native life. Simultaneously, Siddons uses Gilpin's work to explore the limitations of White advocacy in a political moment that emphasized the need for Indigenous visibility and voices.

Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon introduces contemporary Diné (Navajo) artists as interlocutors, critics, and activists whose work embodies and extends the cultural sovereignty politics of earlier generations and makes visible the queerness often left implicit in Gilpin's photographs. Siddons puts their work in conversation with Gilpin's, taking up her mandate to viewers and readers of The Enduring Navajo to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their own terms.

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The third volume in an authoritative and comprehensive series, The Photobook: A History volume III provides a unique perspective on the story of contemporary photography through the genre of the photobook. Continuing in the vein of the first two volumes, Volume III is a study of the major trends and movements that have shaped the photobook genre globally since the birth of photography in the early nineteenth century. Volume III pays particular attention to photobooks published after World War II, covering contemporary themes of modern life, from diaristic photography of place and people to twentieth-century propaganda books and some of the finest works to emerge from the recent self-publishing boom. The Photobook volumes represent a valuable catalogue of rare and important photobooks, and since Phaidon published Volume I in 2004, are now regarded by academics, students and photobook bibliophiles as the definitive works on this subject.

Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, David Levi Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smart phones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust.

In the first ekphrasis title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do?

Offering a poignant argument in the era of fake news, Strauss draws attention to new changes in the technology of seeing. Some uses of technical images are causing the connection between images and belief (between seeing and believing) to fray and pull apart. How is this shifting our relationship to images? Will this crisis in what we can believe come to threaten our very purchase on the real? This book is an inquiry into the history and future of our belief in images.

A groundbreaking work on the power of photography as a vehicle for civil protest

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted.

Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the civil must be distinguished from the political as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay's book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship--inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct.

Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

Since photography's invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death--mortevivum--in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering--and death--are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.

Photography's history, inextricably linked to colonialism and white supremacy, is a catalog of othering, surveillance, and the violence of objectification. In the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, photographs after the fact tell viewers that blackness comes with a corresponding violence that no human intervention can abate. In Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, photographic evidence of its sovereign failure suggests that the formerly enslaved cannot overthrow their masters and survive to tell the tale. And in South Africa and the United States, a loop of racial violence reminds black subjects of their lower-class status mandated via the state. Illustrating the global nature of antiblackness that pervades photographic archives of the present and the past, Mortevivum reveals how we live in a repetition of imagery signaling who lives and who dies on a gelatin silver print--on a page in a book, on the cover of newspaper, and in the memory of millions.

The URL for this publication is https: //on-seeing-mortevivum.org/.