William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age--a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies. Drawing on Talbot's fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The fullest personal encounter ever published of one couple's encounter with the paranormal, documented with photographs. Beginning with the appearance of orbs, and shedding light on other phenomena such as spirit photography, faeries, ghost lights, ball lightening, crop circles, even alien abductions, the journey John and Katie lead us through culminates with a startling new perspective: we are not alone on this planet, and non-human-intelligence interacts with us on a daily basis.

This, the second book in the Beyond Trilogy, expands on John and Katie's experiences and photographs of the orb phenomena covered in their first book. It reveals astounding new photographs and opens up exciting new questions about the whole nature of paranormal phenomena in general. John and Katie's photographs of orbs, angels and other apparitions have brought them into worldwide contact with other experiencers and researchers: it is from this basis that they now take a major step beyond the visible photographable phenomena, and current New Age notions about orbs, to reveal new insights about the paranormal. Could it be that orbs are the indicators of a wider, "beyond" reality? Is the symbology of orbs as images of oneness, drawing our attention to the most important orb of all: the orb of Earth on which we all live? Their ongoing photographs, personal experiences, and the amazing synchronistic events they found themselves part of reveal a conscious, purposeful phenomena that can interact with us as individuals, whoever and wherever we are. This inevitably leads to a spiritual perspective that crosses all religious and cultural boundaries, helping us to see that this one blue orb of Earth on which we all live, is greater than all that divides us! Orbs & Beyond is the vital visual link between Beyond Photography, and the forthcoming Beyond Reality.

While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.

Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including academics, critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written? Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualised for art and re-contextualised for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'? Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the essays examine the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.

This book explores the history of visual technology and archaeology and outlines how the introduction of interactive 3D computer modelling to the discipline parallels very closely the earlier integration of photography into archaeological fieldwork.