Photography: A Critical Introduction (Fifth Edition), edited by Liz Wells

The desire and necessity to visually document, analyze, and interact with our social world is timeless and so a text that tries to explore one aspect of visual production, evaluation, and interaction—photography—and trace its almost 200-year evolution is a massive and formidable task indeed. Photography: A Critical Introduction, edited by Liz Wells, accepts this challenge and steeps the reader in a thorough understanding of the field's major philosophical players, including Baudelaire, Barthes, Berger, Benjamin, Burgin, Flusser, Kracauer, Eco, Moholy-Nagy, Ohrn, Sontag, Szarkowski, and Trachtenberg. It also admirably provides insight on something so generic, widespread, ubiquitous, and ever-changing—photographic use—with theoretical insights like “photographs can exhaust experiences, using up the beautiful through rendering it into cliché” (p. 33)...