Mirror images
At the pith of any criticism of photographic realism is the idea that the appliance embodies conventions and assumptions about picturing.The consequences of the staged, manipulated, mocked-up image......
Camera space
The principal difference between camera images and the image in the mirror is that the former – with or without a lens – focuses light at one point. In so doing, the cam produces an image....
Reality effect
The photographer Cartier-Bresson once described photographs as the ‘meeting of an instant and geometry’. His point is poetically put, but it captures something of photography’s position.....
Frame
The frame plays a central role in photography, perhaps even more than it does in painting. It may be helpful at this point to distinguish between.....view

Digital photography developed some 30 years ago as a requirement of space exploration. Essentially, technicians faced the problem of how to send images across vast distances: there is no point dispatching a probe to photograph Saturn’s rings if it subsequently drifts off into deep space with the film remaining on board. A system had to be found for recovering the images by transposing them into information capable of transmission via radio waves. This problem....view

Photography is between ‘documents’ and ‘pictures’, or, to put it another way, between ‘documentary’ and ‘art-photography’. All of these terms are problematic, but the distinction is real and has generated much of the photography we routinely encounter. The photographic document, like other kinds of document, is typically perceived to be a neutral, styleless, and objective record of information. The document is usually ...view