From as early as 1839, artists began exploring photography's enormous potential for storytelling and often went to great lengths to create pictures for the camera. Here, a short introductory essay summarizes the history of staged photogaphy, highlighting key debates on the medium's blunt factuality and its capacity for deception.

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.

In this study of British realism, Armstrong explains how fiction entered into a relationship with the new popular art of Victorian photography that transformed the world into a picture.

Essay and Interview with Dennis Freedman by Susan Kismaric and Dennis Freedman.

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.

An exciting change is currently taking place in architecture photography: apparently neutral, realistic illustrations are giving way to the creation of an individual reality. New techniques permit unusual angles and perspectives, and digital processing allows for the manipulation of reality. Fine artists have long discovered the formal language of architecture as a subject. By means of a wide range of contemporary artworks this volume shows the visual bandwidth which architecture photography demonstrates in our post-digital age. With works by: Doug Aitken, Thomas Demand, Filip Dujardin, Roland Fischer, Andreas Gursky, Edgar Martins, Erwin Olaf, Hans Op de Beeck, Bas Princen, Thomas Ruff, Philipp Schaerer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall and many more.

An illustrated study of the interactions between photographic technique and literary representation in the nineteenth century.