Bringing his vast knowledge and experience to bear, John Blakemore explores the creative as well as the technical processes involved in black and white photography. Long awaited for the many thousands of photographers that have attended his legendary workshops over the years and essential for the many more that have never had the chance, this is a unique insight into the art of one of photography's most influential practitioners and an important document of the methods of one of photography's most important teachers.

A master of the black-and-white medium offers practical insights into his photographic techniques, technical advice on the processes involved, and helpful advice for photographers of all levels.

"Taking full advantage of the latest features in Adobe Photoshop CS3, this book works at the frontier of black-and-white photography and digital imaging. You will discover the most creative ways to convert your picture to black and white, how to fine-tune the monochrome image, and how to emphasize your subject's qualities."-[book cover].

Fully updated and revised, this seminal book explains and illustrates what photographs are, how they were made and used in the past and, more particularly, what their place is in the creative arts and visual communications world of today. Paul Hill looks at photographs as modes of expression and explores the diversity of approaches taken when creating photographs and what these mean for a photographer’s practice and purpose. It emphasises the importance of contextualisation to the understanding of the medium, diving into the ideas behind the images and how the camera transforms and influences how we see the world. With an impressive collection of 200 full colour images from professional practitioners and artists, it invites us to consider the foundations of photography’s past and the digital revolution’s impact on the creation and dissemination of photographs today. Essential reading for all students of photography, it is an invaluable guide for those who want to make a career in photography, covering most areas of photographic practice from photojournalism to fine art to personal essay.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.