Those born since the digital revolution, seem to have the hardest time re-imagining the role of photography in the world today. Thinking of photography as a visual language is the approach this book adopts to addresses this challenge.Considering photography in this way develops the metaphor of 'learning a language' when attempting to explain what photography can be, and what it can give a student in transferable creative and life skills. This begins with challenging the pre-conception that successful photography is defined by the successful single image or 'the good photograph'.The book emphasises the central role of narrative and visual storytelling through a technique of 'photosketching' to develop the building blocks of visual creativity and ultimately to craft successful bodies of photographic work.New Ways of Seeing explains how to both learn and teach photography as a visual language, appropriate for both professionals and students working today.

This alternative study of archive and photography sits firmly against the backdrop of the traditional archive. Although many types of image assemblages feature-public and private, formal and informal, physical and digital-they are all considered in relation to the highly regulated systems that operate within the institutional milieu. Cataloguing is presented as a radical form of knowledge production, and the catalogue as a critical tool for mapping image time. The unfamiliar and overlooked language of image description is considered as having a life, a worth and an aesthetic value of its own. Functioning at the intersection of text and image, this book combines media culture and techniques of the archive, as well as contemporary discourse on art and conceptual writing. There is a media-archaeological debate throughout as to how physical archive systems and material technologies connect with different archival models, including social media spaces and other image networks.

Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera-including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium that appear throughout these writers' work demonstrate the ways in which one representational form actually influences another--by changing how artists conceive of identity, history, and art itself. A Familiar Strangeness thus challenges the notion of an absolute break between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism, a break that typically centers precisely on the two movements' supposedly differing relation to the camera. Just as modernist fiction interrupts and questions the link between visuality and knowledge, so American realist fiction can be understood as making the world less knowable precisely by making it more visible.

Language has always been central to the meaning and exploitation of photographic images. However, the various types and "styles" of language associated with different photographic genres have been largely overlooked. This book considers the nature of photography, examining the language used in titles, captions and commentaries, particularly as they relate to documentary photography, photojournalism and fashion photography. The Spoken Image addresses the question of how the photograph communicates its message, with or without the aid of language. The book looks at the work of film-makers such as Antonioni and Greenaway to contrast filmic methods of narration with those of photography. Scott concludes that photography has arrived at a level of communicative sophistication equal to that of modern textual narratives, in conjunction with which it often works.

"A remarkably rich and provocative set of essays on the virtually infinite kinds of meanings generated by images in both the verbal and visual arts. Ranging from Michelangelo to Velazquez and Delacroix, from the art of the emblem book to the history of photography and film, The Language of Images offers at once new ways of thinking about the inexhaustibly complex relation between verbal and iconic representation."—James A. W. Heffernan, Dartmouth College

"Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind."--Alibris.