In a world where everyone is a photographer now, how do you stand out? The answer can be found in this simple but profound book. It will train your eye to see what others don't. -- David Hieatt This isn't a book about how to take the best pictures. It's not even about the technical aspects of photography or how to make it as a photographer. In fact, it argues that you should take fewer photographs. By sharing 10 practices honed over a lifetime spent behind the lens working with clients such as Adidas, Levi Strauss, and Apple, photographer Andrew Paynter encourages you to develop a more considered approach to photography so that you craft pictures with care. Do Photo teaches novice, intermediate and advanced photographers - and everyone in between - how to use their cameras to really connect with subjects, create memorable and more impactful photographs, and to enjoy the process along the way. And guess what? It all starts before you even pick up the camera.

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect? What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem. These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but short ‘auto-ethnographic’ interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

The Brown Sisters presents a photographic project as compelling in effect as it is simple in conception: four women, 25 years. Each year since 1975 photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The series now measures a quarter century in the lives of the sisters, who in 1975 ranged in age from 15 to 25; each picture is dense with allusions to the year of experience that separates it from the one before.

What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to' approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.

Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of ’difficult histories’. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.

For decades, people have made certain assumptions about photographs, the primary one being that they are truthful in depicting reality. While this is true in many cases, it is not always so. This book traces the rise of photography’s perceived veracity. It shows why a combination of pre-knowledge of early developments in imagery, a persistent marketing campaign espousing the accuracy of photographs and a perception by users that what they got from their photographs was an accurate depiction acted to create the belief in the photograph’s veracity. The book uses philosophy, physiology, psychology and photography to tell this story and concludes by describing a system of identification that could be used to separate images that are not always what they seem. The turbulence caused to photography with the introduction of digital imaging is described and is the impetus for the beginning of the discussion about where photography sits today amongst other images.