Photographic theory : an historical anthology / edited by Andrew E. Hershberger.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Before photography to invention: c. 380 B.C.E.-1839. -- Camera/Vision. -- Excerpts from the Allegory of the cave, in The republic / Plato -- The function of the eye, as explained by the Camera Obscura / Leonardo da Vinci -- Description of the Camera Lucida / William H. Wollaston -- Art/History. -- Excerpts on linear perspective, in On painting / Leon Battista Alberti -- Account of the late Mr. [Robert] Barker / Anonymous -- Description of the process of painting and effects of light invented by Daguerre, and applied by him to the pictures of the diorama / Louis-Jacques-Mand©♭ Daguerre -- Invention to pictorialism: 1839-c. 1880. -- What is photography? -- Some account of the art of photogenic drawing / William Henry Fox Talbot -- The pencil of nature, a new discovery / Nathaniel Parker Willis and Timothy O. Porter, eds. -- Report [on the Daguerreotype to the Chamber of Deputies] / Fran©ʹois Arago -- Art/History. -- Upon photography in an artistic view, and in its relations to the arts / Sir William J. Newton -- La photographie / Antoine Joseph Wiertz -- Photography / Eastlake, Lady (Elizabeth) -- Camera/Vision. -- The stereoscope and the stereograph / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Combination printing, in Pictorial effect in photography / Henry Peach Robinson -- Annals of my glass house / Julia Margaret Cameron --

Modernism and postmodernism to digital imaging: c. 1960-c.1990. -- Art/History. -- Equivalence : the perennial trend / Minor White -- Perspective, in Language of art / Nelson Goodman -- Can there ever again be a history of photography? / Peter C. Bunnell -- Introduction to Before photography : painting and the invention of photography / Peter Galassi -- New metaphorics : spirit and symbol in contemporary landscape photography / Gretchen Garner -- Camera/Vision. -- Introduction to The photographer's eye / John Szarkowski -- Post-visualization / Jerry Uelsmann -- Introduction to New topographics / William Jenkins -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Excerpts from The world viewed / Stanley Cavell -- Notes on the index : seventies art in America / Rosalind Krauss -- Photography and fetish / Christian Metz -- Film, photography, and fetish : the analyses of Christian Metz / Ben Singer -- What is photography? -- On the nature of photography / Rudolf Arnheim -- Photography, vision and representation / Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen -- The directorial mode : notes toward a definition / A.D. Coleman -- Selections from Transparent pictures : on the nature of photographic realism / Kendall L. Walton -- The photograph as post-industrial object : an essay on the ontological standing of photographs / Vil©♭m Flusser -- Identity/Politics. -- The traffic in photographs / Allan Sekula -- Of Mother Nature and Marlboro men : an inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography / Deborah Bright -- Excerpts from Right of inspection / Jacques Derrida -- Fetal images : the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction / Rosalind Pollack Petchesky --

Modernism to postmodernism: c. 1920-c.1960. -- Camera/Vision. -- Photography and the new God / Paul Strand -- Light : a medium of plastic expression / L©Łszl©đ Moholy-Nagy -- Seeing photographically / Edward Weston -- The camera's glass eye / Clement Greenberg -- What should photographs look like? -- Aims / Albert Renger-Patzsch -- A personal credo / Ansel Adams -- Our illustrations / Frank R. Fraprie -- Photography at the crossroads / Berenice Abbott -- Art/History. -- Excerpts from Perspective as symbolic form / Erwin Panofsky -- The age of the world picture / Martin Heidegger -- Excerpts from Museum without walls / Andr©♭ Malraux -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Photography and typography / Jan Tschichold -- The making of a film, in Film as art / Rudolph Arnheim -- The ontology of the photographic image, in What is cinema? / Andr©♭ Bazin -- What is photography? -- Mechanism and expression, the essence and value of photography / Franz Roh -- Introduction to The decisive moment / Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Photography / Siegfried Kracauer --

Pictorialism to/and/vs. modernism: c. 1880-c. 1920. -- Camera/Vision. -- Focussing, in Naturalistic photography for students of the art / Peter Henry Emerson -- The death of naturalistic photography / Peter Henry Emerson -- The hand camera : its present importance / Alfred Stieglitz -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Photo-chemical investigations and a new method of determination of the sensitiveness of photographic plates / Ferdinand Hurter and Vero C. Driffield -- Logic as semiotic : the theory of signs / Charles Sanders Peirce -- Intuition and art, in ©†sthetic: as science of expression and general linguistic / Benedetto Croce -- The cinematographical mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion ..., in Creative evolution / Henri Bergson -- What should photographs look like? -- On the straight print / Robert Demachy -- What is a "straight print"? / Frederick H. Evans -- Photography and artistic-photography / Marius de Zayas --

Postmodernism and digital imaging (return to pictorialism?): c. 1990-c. 2010. -- What is digital photography? -- The transcendental machine? a comparison of digital photography and nineteenth-century modes of photographic representation / Diana Emery Hulick -- Photojournalism in the age of computers / Fred Ritchin -- Phantasm : digital imaging and the death of photography, in Metamorphoses / Geoffrey Batchen -- Escaping reality : digital imagery and the resources of photography / Barbara E. Savedoff -- Fixing the art of digital photography : electronic shadows / Ellen Handy -- Digital ontologies : the ideality of form in/ and code storage, or, Can graphesis challenge mathesis? / Johanna Drucker -- Identity/Politics. -- Do not doubt the dangerousness of the 12-inch-tall politician / David Wojnarowicz -- The politics of focus : feminism and photography theory / Lindsay Smith -- Re-picturing photography : a language in the making / Aphrodite D©♭sir©♭e Navab -- A painful labour : responsibility and photography / Sharon Sliwinski -- Camera/Vision. -- Clement Greenberg and Walker Evans : transparency and transcendence / Mike Weaver -- The shadows on the wall, in The reconfigured eye : visual truth in the post-photographic era / William J. Mitchell -- Of fish, birds, cats, mice, spiders, flies, pigs, and chimpanzees : how chance casts the historic action photograph into doubt / Robin Kelsey -- Art/History. -- The invisible dragon : on beauty I / Dave Hickey -- The idiom in photography as the truth in painting / Rosemary Hawker -- "Impressed by nature's hand" : photography and authorship / Douglas R. Nickel -- Photography and memory. -- Surviving images : Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory / Marianne Hirsch -- Visualizing memory : photographs and the art of biography / Deborah Willis -- Remembering September 11 : photography as cultural diplomacy / Liam Kennedy -- Through a glass, darkly : photography and cultural memory / Alan Trachtenberg -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Curiosity and conjecture : mathematics, photography, and the imagination / David Travis -- Image as trace : speculations about an undead paradigm / Peter Geimer -- The photographic argument of philosophy / Alexander Sekatskiy.

This book presents a compendium of readings spanning ancient times to the digital age that are related to the history, nature, and current status of debates in photographic theory. The book offers an authoritative and academically up-to-date compendium of the history of photographic theory, and represents the only collection to include ancient, Renaissance, and 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century writings on the subject.