Photography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself. For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographers—including Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenko—used text to shape the reception of their visual work. From the diary to print, the literary word imbues that photographic moment with a personal life story, and frames and reframes it in the writing of history. In this primer on photographic literacy, Reischl argues for the central place that photography has played in the formation of the Russian literary imagination over the course of roughly seventy years. From image to text and back again, she traces the visual consciousness of modern Russian literature as captured through the lens of the Russian author-photographer.

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state. Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.

This beautifully illustrated study recaptures the rich history of women photographers and image collectors in nineteenth-century England. Situating the practice of collecting, exchanging and displaying photographs and other images in the context of feminine sociability, Patrizia Di Bello shows that albums express Victorian women's experience of modernity. The albums of individual women, and the broader feminine culture of collecting and displaying imagesare examined, uncovering the cross-references and fertilizations between women's albums and illustrated periodicals, and demonstrating the way albums and photography, itself, were represented in women's magazines, fashion plates, and popular novels. Bringing a sophisticated eye to overlooked images such as the family photograph, Di Bello not only illustrates their significance as historical documents but elucidates the visual rhetorics at play. In doing so, she identifies the connections between Victorian album-making and the work of modern-day amateurs and artists who use digital techniques to compile and decorate albums with Victorian-style borders and patterns. At a time when photographic album-making is being re-vitalised by digital technologies, this book rewrites the history of photographic albums, placing the female collector at its centre and offering an alternative history of photography focused on its uses rather than on its aesthetic or artistic considerations. It is remarkable in elegantly connecting the history of photography with the fields of material culture and women's studies.

This open access book discusses the functionality of the use of the language of photography in teachers' initial and ongoing training. It analyzes the nature of photography as a representation system, facilitating inquiry and reflection on its practice for teachers and evocating on theories and beliefs that may guide their work in classrooms. Photography is used to represent symbolically and affectively possible contradictions in teaching activities or the inconsistencies between planned teaching tasks and the educational purposes pursued. Resolving these conflicts is one of the ways to promote professional development. This book also describes photo-elicitation and photographic storytelling as work procedures. By analyzing the contributions of these techniques, the development of teachers is improved.

This volume seeks to close the gap between education systems across the world that remain systematically devoted to understanding our world through text rather than images. Through an exploration of the contributions of well- and lesser-known visual thinkers from across disciplines and geographies, the contributors offer contemporary appraisals and modern re-conceptualizations of the subject. The book illuminates how experts from various disciplines ranging from art, communication, education, and philosophy laid the foundations for what we know today as visual literacy. These foundations and innovative ways of thinking and understanding images have been disruptive, but until now, have been relatively understudied. As such, the chapters examine the context of individual thinkers, expanding upon famous theories and providing new insight into why these visual and cognitive processes are imperative to learning and education and to disciplines spanning art history, museum studies, philosophy, photography, and more. The authors, all members of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), are committed to advancing the study of visual literacy by raising new questions and proposing new routes of inquiry. A unique and timely exploration of the way we derive meaning from what we see and how we interact with our visual environment, it will appeal to researchers, scholars, and educators from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds across art, art education, art history, design, information science, photography, and visual communication.

It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented. Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.