ABSTRACT
This book offers a series of essays on contemporary photography and theory the complexity of their relationship. It addresses the relationship between photography and identity from the early use of photography as a new technology to produce honorific images of wealthy sitters to its contemporary use as a way of sharing representations of the self via social media. The book expands upon some of the ideas explored in relation to the portrait in order to look at landscape as a discursive construction – a way in which one assigns meaning and significance to land. Like the self, landscape is not natural but a cultural construction. The book addresses the way in which a number of contemporary photographers have used performance as a means of challenging traditional codes of representation. It introduces psychoanalytic theory as a means of understanding the unconscious fears, fantasies and pleasures at stake in looking at photographs.
