1 Thinking about photography: debates, historically and now
The impact of new technologies
Aesthetics in an era of digital imaging
Critical reflections on realism
Case study: Image analysis: the example of Migrant Mother
Photography and social history
Social history and photography
2 Surveyors and surveyed: photography out and about
Documentary and photojournalism: issues and definitions
Defining the real in the digital age
Victorian surveys and investigations
The construction of documentary
The Farm Security Administration (FSA)
Documentary: new cultures, new spaces
Theory and the critique of documentary
Cultural politics and everyday life
Documentary and photojournalism in the global age
3 ‘Sweet it is to scan …’: personal photographs and popular photography
Private lives and personal pictures: users and readers
In and beyond the charmed circle of home
The public and the private in personal photography
The working classes picture themselves
Kodak and the mass market: the Kodak path
Paths unholy and deeds without a name?
Post-family and post-photography? The digital world and the end of privacy
4 The subject as object: photography and the human body
The photographic body in crisis
Photography and identification
Objectification, fetishism, voyeurism
Pornography and sexual imagery
Class and representations of the body
Interventions and scientific images
Digital imaging and the malleable body
Case study: Materialism and embodiment
5 Spectacles and illusions: photography and commodity culture
Introduction: the society of the spectacle
Photographic portraiture and commodity culture
Photojournalism, glamour and the paparazzi
Stock photography, image banks and corporate media
Commodity spectacles in advertising photography
Case study: The commodification of human experience – Coca Cola’s Open Happiness campaign
The transfer and contestation of meaning
Hegemony in photographic representation
Photomontage: concealing social relations
The fetishisation of labour relations
The gaze and gendered representations
Case study: Tourism, fashion and ‘the Other’
Case study: Benetton, Toscani and the limits of advertising
6 On and beyond the white walls: photography as art
The complex relations between photography and art
Realism and systems of representation
Photography claiming a place in the gallery
Case study: Art, design, politics: Soviet Constructivism
Case study: Art movements and intellectual currencies: Surrealism
Late twentieth-century perspectives
Conceptual art and the photographic
Photography and the postmodern
Identity and the multi-cultural
Case study: Landscape as genre
Photography within the institution