Product Description: This remarkable book joins the company of “self-work,” deep acts of memory that serve to illuminate the present by shining the clear light of careful regard on the past. The book finds company in the work of D J Waldie’s Holy Land, Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the profound My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard...read more

Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works -- not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant") to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

Product Description: This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination...read more

Product Description: At this transitional moment in the field of photography, how should we consider what is to come for the medium? Can its past and present practitioners help guide us, both as creators and as observers? David Levi Strauss--eminent author, critic and teacher--rises to the challenge of these questions and more in "Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography...read more

Product Description: This is the complete collection of writings on photographic criticism by an important art historian. The essays on photography, video, and film herein anthologized span nearly thirty years, 1983 - 2012, and, to varying degrees, engage their critical objects within a post-modernist, textualist theoretical context...read more

Product Description: Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library―no exception to this trend―was filled with individual photographs and images in books...read more

Product Description: Explores how to see more than a literal image, discussing such subjects as the "the mind's eye," "music to the eye," and "the gift of light." (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)