What is a photograph? That simple question is far from settled, as this innovative book demonstrates. 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, 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 of the world. For others, it is mainly a way of remembering people and places. For still others, it is a sign of bourgeois life, a kind of addiction of the middle class. And for yet others, it is a troublesome interloper, which has confused people's ideas of reality and fine art to the point that they have difficulty even defining what a photograph is. And for some, the whole question of finding photography's nature is itself misguided from the beginning.
This provocative second volume in the new Routledge series "The Art Seminar" presents not one but many answers to the question what makes a photograph a photograph?