Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A history of theories of photographic practices, this text sets out to do a number of things: to recover the critical place of the photographic archive within the avant-garde; to defend the philosophic claims of realism in assessing photography this century; and to present a dialogic defence of the naturalistic or documnetary image.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of figures and plates (p. vi)
• Acknowledgements (p. xii)
• Introduction: realism, contradiction and interpretation (p. 2)
• 1 Photography, the everyday and the Russian Revolution (p. 14)
• 2 Technique, technology and the everyday: German photographic culture in the 1920s and 1930s (p. 40)
• 3 The making of documentary: documentary after factography (p. 58)
• 4 The state, the everyday and the archive (p. 72)
• 5 Surrealism, photography and the everyday (p. 98)
• 6 Inside Modernism: American photography and post-war culture (p. 114)
• 7 John Berger and Jean Mohr: the return to communality (p. 128)
• 8 The rise of theory and the critique of realism: photography in Britain in the 1980s (p. 144)
• 9 Disfiguring the ideal: the body, photography and the everyday (p. 172)
• 10 Jeff Wall: the social pathology of everyday life (p. 184)
• 11 Jo Spence: photography, empowerment and the everyday (p. 199)
• 12 Digital imagery and the critique of realism (p. 216)
• Index (p. 229)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

From a socialist viewpoint favoring idealistic, worker-oriented photographs of the 1920s-30s, Roberts nostalgically meanders through our century in a tedious, repetitive, often apparently contradictory search for a factographic photography of the "everyday" (Lewis Hine to Jo Spence). His title implies a photographic theme, but the text displays a political one ("laboring body" to "sexualized body"). The issue of class is central. He talks over and around the images. Ideology reigns (socialist versus bourgeois culture), but whole sections drift away from any central theme. Roberts, apparently blindfolded, manages to get through chapter 7 without direct reference to any of the 15 reproductions. On the rare occasion of a direct reference, he seems not to look at the picture: about Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, arguably history's best-known photograph, he is able to say, ". . . the woman holds on to her two children . . ." (as is obvious to anyone who looks, the mother has three children and does not hold on to any of them). In another chapter he ignores several reproductions and speaks of unreproduced photographs by the same artist. It seems appropriate that apparently bored editors allowed many typos and misspellings to pass their "scrutiny." Graduates; faculty. C. Chiarenza; emeritus, University of Rochester