Photography/Politics: One

Reviews / Votes

Still as relevant now as when it first came out, this is a landmark collection of essays. The first to be attentive to the politics of class, gender and race in the working of photographs, it is critically sophisticated yet accessible - and still required reading for anyone interested in understanding the history and theory of photography. It is wonderful that it is now available in a new edition.
Patrizia Di Bello, Professor of History and Theory of Photography, Birkbeck, University of London. Editor-in-chief, History of Photography.

A welcome reminder of the need to ask hard questions of a medium we too often take for granted as natural and truthful. Featuring now-classic essays about the photographic representation of class, race and gender, this anthology demonstrates above all that the concerns of writers and artists in the late 1970s were not so distant from our own.
Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford

A seminal work of history and theory.
Duncan Forbes, Head of Photography, V&A Museum

This book opened the door to the social life of photographs for me with its the possibilities for thinking the past and the future through these sets and conditions of images. I read it so much that my copy fell apart, and I used to xerox the disaggregated segments for my students. Hopefully, another cohort will similarly devour this new edition. We need now it even more than before.
Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University