In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes, when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important photographic work of the last three decades.

At a critical point in the development of photography, this book offers an engaging, detailed and far-reaching examination of the key issues that are defining contemporary photographic culture. Photography Reframed addresses the impact of radical technological, social and political change across a diverse set of photographic territories: the ontology of photography; the impact of mass photographic practice; the public display of intimate life; the current state of documentary, and the political possibilities of photographic culture. These lively, accessible essays by some of the best writers in photography together go deep into the most up-to-date frameworks for analysing and understanding photographic culture and shedding light on its histories. Photography Reframed is a vital road map for anyone interested in what photography has been, what it has become, and where it is going.

This new edition of The Photographic Image in Digital Culture explores the condition of photography after some 20 years of remediation and transformation by digital technology. Through ten especially commissioned essays, by some of the leading scholars in the field of contemporary photography studies, a range of key topics are discussed including: the meaning of software in the production of photograph; the nature of networked photographs; the screen as the site of photographic display; the simulation of photography in the videogame; photography, ubiquitous computing and technologies of ambient intelligence; developments in vernacular photography and social media; the photograph and the digital archive; the curation and exhibition of the networked photograph; the dominance of the image bank in commercial and advertising photography; the complexities of citizen photojournalism. A recurring theme addressed throughout is the nature of ‘photography after photography’ and the paradoxical nature of the medium in the 21st century; a time when the traditional technology of photography has become defunct while there is more ‘photography’ than ever. This is an ideal book for students studying photography and digital media.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

While earlier theorists held up "experience" as the defining character of installation art, few people have had the opportunity to walk through celebrated installation pieces from the past. Instead, installation art of the past is known through archival photographs that limit, define, and frame the experience of the viewer. Monica E. McTighe argues that the rise of photographic-based theories of perception and experience, coupled with the inherent closeness of installation art to the field of photography, had a profound impact on the very nature of installation art, leading to a flood of photography- and film-based installations. With its close readings of specific works, Framed Spaces will appeal to art historians and theorists across a broad spectrum of the visual arts.

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing” 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 new edition of the definitive title in the field of contemporary art photography by one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, Charlotte Cotton. 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.

Why we must forget photography and reject the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates. The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image. Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies, and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organization of visual reproduction.

We live in a time in which photographs have become extraordinarily mobile. They can be exchanged and circulated at the swipe of a finger across a screen. The digital photographic image appears and disappears with a mere gesture of the hand. Yet, this book argues that this mobility of the image was merely accelerated by digital media and telecommunications. Photographs, from the moment of their invention, set images loose by making them portable, reproducible, projectable, reduced in size and multiplied. The fact that we do not associate analogue photography with such mobility has much to do with the limitations of existing histories and theories of photography, which have tended to view photographic mobility as either an incidental characteristic or a fault. Photography : The Unfettered Image traces the emergence of these ways of understanding photography, but also presents a differently nuanced and materialist history in which photography is understood as part of a larger development of media technologies. It is situated in much broader cultural contexts: caught up in the European colonial ambition to "grasp the world" and in the development of a new, artificial "second nature" dependent on the large-scale processing of animal and mineral materials. Focussing primarily on Victorian and 1920s–30s practices and theories, it demonstrates how photography was never simply a technology for fixing a fleeting reality.