Photography

A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

Between 1909 and 1915 Eugene Atget produced seven albums filled with photographs of Paris at the height of its belle epoque. The albums were prototypes for books that were never published.

In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

During the Second Empire (1852-1870), Baron Haussmann and Emperor Napoleon III reconstructed Paris into the City of Light. The government and other public institutions commissioned many photographers - among them Charles Marville, Henri Le Secq, Edouard-Denis Baldus, and Gustav Le Gray - to record the old Parisian architecture and to document the demolition and reconstruction. Shelly Rice explores not only the literal connections between photography and the transformation of Paris but also the metaphorical ones. All of the essays revolve around a central theme - the creation of modern urban space, in both two and three demensions, and the impact of this space on the lives of those who walked the streets of the 19th century.

Burden of Representation( Essays on Photographies and Histories) <> Paperback <> JohnTagg <> UniversityofMinnesotaPress

For one or two semester courses in the History of Photography. A chronological history of photography ranging from the medium’s beginnings to the present, with emphasis on the major inventions and image makers and the social and cultural settings in which photography flourished. The book was written to introduce students to photography. It does not require that students possess any technical know-how and can be taught without referring to techniques in photography. Incorporating the latest research and international uses of photography, the text surveys the history of photography in such a way that students can gauge the medium's long-term multifold developments and see the historical and intellectual contexts in which photographers lived and worked. It also provides a unique focus on contemporary photo-based work and electronic media.