Offers a guide to capturing everyday moments using an amateur camera, including tips on do's and don'ts, phtographic techniques, special effects, and candid photographs.

From the pioneers of the early part of the century to the experimental artists who will take us into the future, "Masters of Photography" is an indispensable guide to over 50 of the world's best-known and most influential photographers. Arranged in alphabetical order by photographer, from Eve Arnold to Weegee, each entry contains fascinating biographical and technical details along with sumptuous reproductions of representative and groundbreaking works."

This book examines the photography’s unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium’s ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.

In Photographic Returns Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments of racial crisis come to be known photographically and how the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in contemporary art. Smith engages photographs by Rashid Johnson, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Lorna Simpson, Jason Lazarus, Carrie Mae Weems, Taryn Simon, and Dawoud Bey, among others. Each of these artists turns to the past—whether by using nineteenth-century techniques to produce images or by re-creating iconic historic photographs—as a way to use history to negotiate the present and to call attention to the unfinished political project of racial justice in the United States. By interrogating their use of photography to recall, revise, and amplify the relationship between racial politics of the past and present, Smith locates a temporal recursivity that is intrinsic to photography, in which images return to haunt the viewer and prompt reflection on the present and an imagination of a more just future.

'It's not just the body that changes: Fashions and hairstyles evolve; pets come and go; typewriters, analog clocks, and telephones with cords disappear; and finally, film gives way to digital and the computer replaces the darkroom. While Weathering Time is a personal archive, and I am mining the archive to address issues of the female body, the family snapshot and loss, I am also interested in producing images that suggest some of the experiences of my generation. Indeed, the photographs underscore the cultural, technological, and physical changes that have occurred over the past thirty-five years--from my youth to the dawn of my old age.' Nancy Floyd

Providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs, Greg Battye focuses on the storytelling power of a single image, rather than the sequence. Drawing on ideas from painting, drawing, film, video, and multimedia, he applies contemporary research and theories drawn from cognitive science and psychology to the analysis of photographs. Using genuine forensic photographs of crime scenes and accidents, the book mines human drama and historical and sociological authenticity to argue for the centrality of the perception and representation of time in photographic narrativity.

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers' aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

'Conflict Time Photography' explores the relationship between photography and sites of conflict over time, highlighting the fact that time itself is a fundamental aspect of the photographic medium.