Reframing Photography

Theory and Practice

The Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice book and website are about photography in the widest possible sense of the word. Each presents a broad and inclusive rethinking of conceptual and technical aspects of photography across time periods, across themes, and through varied materials. Essays and how-to sections provide ideas, information, and inspiration for artists who use photography in varied ways.

Ashley Elander

Destruction Series, thaumatropes

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The book brings photographic education up to date with contemporary art practice. Essays link photographic conventions with a history of ideas, involving such topics as architecture, literature, psychology, and genetics, and introduce related artists and artworks. How-to sections describe an extensive range of processes, such as viewing devices (including multiple types of cameras, scanners, and the human eye), lighting methods, low-tech ways to reproduce images, film and digital processing, digital, darkroom and manual editing and printing, book arts, pre-cinematic animation techniques, web arts, collage, light box construction, web portfolios, internet art, and more.

Consult this website to view contemporary artists talk about their practice (the In Their Own Words series in our Artists’ Gallery), to view step-by-step video tutorials, to read about additional photographic processes, to locate artists’ works, resources, readings, and opportunities through our Resources of over a thousand web links, and (if you are an instructor) to discover class projects related to book topics or recommended by educators.

Reviews of Reframing Photography

 “… the content is literally mind-blowing …The texts are extremely rigorous and well-researched …. Another quality of the book is that it doesn’t abstract photography from its social context, discussing issues such as censorship in military operation, the place of photography in social networks like facebook, or comparing notions of originality and reproduction in photography to the same notions in genetics, etc.”

Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art

“Reframing Photography, the 560-page encyclopedic book on the subject includes everything about photography and then some…. One of the great things about the book is its underlying premise — that everybody uses photography now, and that for some artists, photography is one, but not the only tool in their studio. The authors … understand that the future of fine art photography might look considerably different than a simple show of framed works hung on a wall. And because of that open interpretation of the field, the book embraces every possible use of the tool and discusses it with open mind.…”

Roberta Fallon, The Art Blog