"This book introduces and offers an overview of conceptual issues relating to photography and to ways of thinking about photographs. It considers the photograph as an artefact used in a range of different ways and circumstances, and photography as a set of practices which take place in particular contexts. Thus it is essentially about reading photographic images rather than about their making." -- P.3.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 359-380) and index.

Thinking about photography: debates, historically and now / Derrick Price and Liz Wells : Aesthetics and technologies ; Contemporary debates ; Case study : Image analysis: the example of Migrant mother ; Histories of photography ; Photography and social history -- Surveyors and surveyed: photography out and about / Derrick Price : Documentary and photojournalism: issues and definitions ; Surveys and social facts ; The construction of documentary ; Documentary: new cultures, new spaces -- Sweet it is to scan...: personal photographs and popular photography / Patricia Holland : In and beyond the charmed circle of home ; Paths unholy and deeds without a name? -- The subject as object: photography and the human body / Michelle Henning : Embodying social difference ; Objects of design and disgust ; Case study : La Ciccilina ; Technological bodies ; Photography, birth and death -- Spectacles and illusions: photography and commodity culture / Anandi Ramamurthy : Introduction: the society and the spectacle ; The grammar of the ad ; Case study : The commodification of human relations and experience: Telenor Mobile TV advertisement, "Everywhere" ; Hegemony in photographic representation ; Fashion photography ; Case study : Tourism, fashion, and 'the other' ; The context of the image ; Case study : Bennetton, Toscani and the limits of advertising -- On and beyond the white walls: photography as art / Liz Wells : Early debates and practices ; The modern era ; Case study : Art, design, politics: Soviet Constructivism; American formalism ; Case study : Art movements and intellectual currencies: Surrealism ; Late twentieth-century perspectives ; Photography within the institution ; Case study : Landscape as genre -- Photography in the age of electronic imaging / Martin Lister : The early 1990s and worries about the truth ; The humanist response ; Further critical issues ; Virtual, hybrid, networked.