This is Photography

A panoramic celebration of two hundred years of photography, featuring the landmark photographs, inventions, innovations, exhibitions, and publications that changed the way we see the world.

Photography has not simply changed how we capture the world: it has changed how we view it, restructuring our very ways of seeing. This ambitious publication, timed to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the first-ever photograph, brings together photographs from leading image-makers―including Zanele Muholi, Man Ray, Barbara Kruger, and Edward Steichen―alongside unexpected selections. This is Photography is set to be the ultimate guide to the magic and mystery of photography.

From the earliest nineteenth-century experiments in fixing light on paper, photography has blossomed and proliferated to a point where some 1.9 trillion photographs are snapped annually. Photographs are now at the core of our image-dominated culture. This book carves a cohesive, compelling path through this dizzying mass of information. Presented chronologically, the book showcases key photographs and objects year by year, each accompanied by a short text entry offering historical, technical, or critical context. Interleaved throughout are longer thematic texts by contributing writers, as well as extracts from the writings of photographers and major thinkers on the subject, bringing a depth of understanding to the principal genres and developments in photography.

Alongside pivotal and instantly recognizable photographic works―from Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies to Rosalind Franklin's DNA imaging, and from the documentary work of Robert Frank to Cindy Sherman―This is Photography records the objects, technical developments, exhibitions, and publications that have shaped the medium, making this an essential resource for anyone interested in photography.