MICHELLE BOGRE - Documentary Photography Reconsidered;HISTORY, THEORY AND PRACTICE

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my friends and colleagues in the documentary world. I am deeply indebted to everyone who graciously met with me and shared ideas about documentary photography in thoughtful, challenging, and often provocative conversations. You are all exceptional. A book on documentary photography must have great photographs, so a very special thank you to all of the photographers whose brilliant photographs grace the pages of this book. I am honored to call many of you my friends. I am indebted to Michelle Achino and Baptiste Lignel, who read the manuscript at various stages and whose perceptive comments improved my writing and my thinking. All authors are dependent on a skilled production team, so my deep gratitude to Julie Grahame, Jack Salazar, Richard Wade, Sophie Barkham, and the editors and staff at Bloomsbury Press, particularly Georgia Kennedy, who enthusiastically embraced the idea for this book, and Sophie Tann, who marshalled it to print. Finally, to my husband, Peter, for his patience and belief in the value of this book.

StephenMayes

This book is dedicated to photography. It offers a necessary reflection on the medium at a moment of anxiety and excitement, as we transition from a world of relative certainty about the purpose and process of the visual image, to a world of unknown possibility with all the attendant uncertainties of opportunity and risk. Read contemporaneously, these chapters present a rich analysis of the photographic history that brought us to this point and they offer strong theoretical and practical guidelines to how we might navigate the next steps. Read in years to come, the book stands as a marker of a historic moment when culture changed, revealing in retrospect how far we are from understanding what we are actually talking about. The images will be the same when viewed from a distant future, but how we understand them will be very different; our conceptual notions of photography and even of truth will be based in alternate paradigms of reality. So, although this is a book about photography, really its a book about words: how do we talk about imagery, what is our conceptual framework, and how do we describe what we look at?