Photograph

The Bookseller A readable text discusses the way in which we see and interpret photographs.

Independent on Sunday Fully and often surprisingly illustrated, carefully annotated and captioned, each combines a historical overview with a nicely opinionated individual approach.

House & Garden Read this book and you will never look at a photograph in the same way again.

The Irish Times (Dublin) concise yet comprehensive, and wonderful value

V. Penelope Pelizzon, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol.40 No.2 An engaging, image-studded survey... Clarke is particularly good at playing two images off against one another to emphasise the cultural assumptions underlying each... Clarke raises fascinating questions about how the portrait seeks to encode social identity. In his representation of landscape, he deftly covers both the picturesque tradition and its opposite, the scientific orientation that viewed photography as a means of mapping and administering land.

Yorkshire Post (Leeds) Clarke does an admirable job of condensing theoretical debates concerning the reading of images

Swansea South Wales Evening Post An important part of the Oxford History of Art series ... It's an enormous subject, but it's tackled in a tremendously accessible manner. A must for anyone interested in taking seriously good pictures.

Rupert Christiansen, Spectator a superb piece of publishing

Graham Clarke is Reader in Literary & Image Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury. His publications include The American City: Literary & Cultural Perspectives (St Martin's Press, 1988), and The Portrait in Photography (Reaktion Books, 1992). He is on the advisory board of the journal History of Photography and the editorial board of Journal of American Studies (Cambridge).