Photographic theory : an historical anthology / edited by Andrew E. Hershberger.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Before photography to invention: c. 380 B.C.E.-1839. -- Camera/Vision. -- Excerpts from the Allegory of the cave, in The republic / Plato -- The function of the eye, as explained by the Camera Obscura / Leonardo da Vinci -- Description of the Camera Lucida / William H. Wollaston -- Art/History. -- Excerpts on linear perspective, in On painting / Leon Battista Alberti -- Account of the late Mr. [Robert] Barker / Anonymous -- Description of the process of painting and effects of light invented by Daguerre, and applied by him to the pictures of the diorama / Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre -- Invention to pictorialism: 1839-c. 1880. -- What is photography? -- Some account of the art of photogenic drawing / William Henry Fox Talbot -- The pencil of nature, a new discovery / Nathaniel Parker Willis and Timothy O. Porter, eds. -- Report [on the Daguerreotype to the Chamber of Deputies] / François Arago -- Art/History. -- Upon photography in an artistic view, and in its relations to the arts / Sir William J. Newton -- La photographie / Antoine Joseph Wiertz -- Photography / Eastlake, Lady (Elizabeth) -- Camera/Vision. -- The stereoscope and the stereograph / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Combination printing, in Pictorial effect in photography / Henry Peach Robinson -- Annals of my glass house / Julia Margaret Cameron.

Pictorialism to/and/vs. modernism: c. 1880-c. 1920. -- Camera/Vision. -- Focussing, in Naturalistic photography for students of the art / Peter Henry Emerson -- The death of naturalistic photography / Peter Henry Emerson -- The hand camera : its present importance / Alfred Stieglitz -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Photo-chemical investigations and a new method of determination of the sensitiveness of photographic plates / Ferdinand Hurter and Vero C. Driffield -- Logic as semiotic : the theory of signs / Charles Sanders Peirce -- Intuition and art, in Æsthetic: as science of expression and general linguistic / Benedetto Croce -- The cinematographical mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion ..., in Creative evolution / Henri Bergson -- What should photographs look like? -- On the straight print / Robert Demachy -- What is a "straight print"? / Frederick H. Evans -- Photography and artistic-photography / Marius de Zayas.

Modernism to postmodernism: c. 1920-c.1960. -- Camera/Vision. -- Photography and the new God / Paul Strand -- Light : a medium of plastic expression / László Moholy-Nagy -- Seeing photographically / Edward Weston -- The camera's glass eye / Clement Greenberg -- What should photographs look like? -- Aims / Albert Renger-Patzsch -- A personal credo / Ansel Adams -- Our illustrations / Frank R. Fraprie -- Photography at the crossroads / Berenice Abbott -- Art/History. -- Excerpts from Perspective as symbolic form / Erwin Panofsky -- The age of the world picture / Martin Heidegger -- Excerpts from Museum without walls / André Malraux -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Photography and typography / Jan Tschichold -- The making of a film, in Film as art / Rudolph Arnheim -- The ontology of the photographic image, in What is cinema? / André Bazin -- What is photography? -- Mechanism and expression, the essence and value of photography / Franz Roh -- Introduction to The decisive moment / Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Photography / Siegfried Kracauer.

Modernism and postmodernism to digital imaging: c. 1960-c.1990. -- Art/History. -- Equivalence : the perennial trend / Minor White -- Perspective, in Language of art / Nelson Goodman -- Can there ever again be a history of photography? / Peter C. Bunnell -- Introduction to Before photography : painting and the invention of photography / Peter Galassi -- New metaphorics : spirit and symbol in contemporary landscape photography / Gretchen Garner -- Camera/Vision. -- Introduction to The photographer's eye / John Szarkowski -- Post-visualization / Jerry Uelsmann -- Introduction to New topographics / William Jenkins -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Excerpts from The world viewed / Stanley Cavell -- Notes on the index : seventies art in America / Rosalind Krauss -- Photography and fetish / Christian Metz -- Film, photography, and fetish : the analyses of Christian Metz / Ben Singer -- What is photography? -- On the nature of photography / Rudolf Arnheim -- Photography, vision and representation / Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen -- The directorial mode : notes toward a definition / A.D. Coleman -- Selections from Transparent pictures : on the nature of photographic realism / Kendall L. Walton -- The photograph as post-industrial object : an essay on the ontological standing of photographs / Vilém Flusser -- Identity/Politics. -- The traffic in photographs / Allan Sekula -- Of Mother Nature and Marlboro men : an inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography / Deborah Bright -- Excerpts from Right of inspection / Jacques Derrida -- Fetal images : the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction / Rosalind Pollack Petchesky.

Postmodernism and digital imaging (return to pictorialism?): c. 1990-c. 2010. -- What is digital photography? -- The transcendental machine? a comparison of digital photography and nineteenth-century modes of photographic representation / Diana Emery Hulick -- Photojournalism in the age of computers / Fred Ritchin -- Phantasm : digital imaging and the death of photography, in Metamorphoses / Geoffrey Batchen -- Escaping reality : digital imagery and the resources of photography / Barbara E. Savedoff -- Fixing the art of digital photography : electronic shadows / Ellen Handy -- Digital ontologies : the ideality of form in/ and code storage, or, Can graphesis challenge mathesis? / Johanna Drucker -- Identity/Politics. -- Do not doubt the dangerousness of the 12-inch-tall politician / David Wojnarowicz -- The politics of focus : feminism and photography theory / Lindsay Smith -- Re-picturing photography : a language in the making / Aphrodite Désirée Navab -- A painful labour : responsibility and photography / Sharon Sliwinski -- Camera/Vision. -- Clement Greenberg and Walker Evans : transparency and transcendence / Mike Weaver -- The shadows on the wall, in The reconfigured eye : visual truth in the post-photographic era / William J. Mitchell -- Of fish, birds, cats, mice, spiders, flies, pigs, and chimpanzees : how chance casts the historic action photograph into doubt / Robin Kelsey -- Art/History. -- The invisible dragon : on beauty I / Dave Hickey -- The idiom in photography as the truth in painting / Rosemary Hawker -- "Impressed by nature's hand" : photography and authorship / Douglas R. Nickel -- Photography and memory. -- Surviving images : Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory / Marianne Hirsch -- Visualizing memory : photographs and the art of biography / Deborah Willis -- Remembering September 11 : photography as cultural diplomacy / Liam Kennedy -- Through a glass, darkly : photography and cultural memory / Alan Trachtenberg -- Interdisciplinary approaches. -- Curiosity and conjecture : mathematics, photography, and the imagination / David Travis -- Image as trace : speculations about an undead paradigm / Peter Geimer -- The photographic argument of philosophy / Alexander Sekatskiy.