In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes, when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important photographic work of the last three decades.

This new edition of The Photographic Image in Digital Culture explores the condition of photography after some 20 years of remediation and transformation by digital technology. Through ten especially commissioned essays, by some of the leading scholars in the field of contemporary photography studies, a range of key topics are discussed including: the meaning of software in the production of photograph; the nature of networked photographs; the screen as the site of photographic display; the simulation of photography in the videogame; photography, ubiquitous computing and technologies of ambient intelligence; developments in vernacular photography and social media; the photograph and the digital archive; the curation and exhibition of the networked photograph; the dominance of the image bank in commercial and advertising photography; the complexities of citizen photojournalism. A recurring theme addressed throughout is the nature of ‘photography after photography’ and the paradoxical nature of the medium in the 21st century; a time when the traditional technology of photography has become defunct while there is more ‘photography’ than ever. This is an ideal book for students studying photography and digital media.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

Imaging Culture is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti and Ségu. Featuring the work of more than twenty-five photographers, it concentrates on those who have been particularly influential for the local development and practice of the medium as well as its international popularization and active participation in the contemporary art market. Imaging Culture looks at how local aesthetic ideas are visually communicated in the photographers' art and argues that though these aesthetic arrangements have specific relevance for local consumers, they transcend geographical and cultural boundaries to have value for contemporary global audiences as well. Imaging Culture is an important and visually interesting book which will become a standard source for those who study African photography and its global impact.

Each of the eight chapters takes a period of up to forty years and examines the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media and individual practitioners.-Back Cover.

Surveys the presence of photography in artistic practice from the 1960s onwards.