ABSTRACT
Photography is primarily a commercial medium. Photographic imagery is used to sell things to us; and, photographs, as well as the apparatus of photography, are on sale as commodities. It is impossible to calculate the amount of photographs in existence, whether in the form of negatives, printed images or digital files. Nevertheless, the vast majority of photographs in the world are either snapshots (see Chapter 5) or are made and used for the purposes of advertising. Despite its ubiquity, advertising photography has been analysed critically far less than photographs made, for example, as documents or as art (see Chapters 6 and 7) (Frosh 2003: 9-11; Slater 1997b: 172). Anandi Ramamurthy has suggested that this is because advertising photographs are not seen as creative in their own right, but rather as parasitic on groundbreaking work in documentary and art photography (Ramamurthy 2009: 217); yet it is worth noting that art photographs and images that document are saleable commodities as well (Badger 2007: 203-220).Writers such as Don Slater have also argued for the importance of going beyond analysing the meanings of photographs in order to consider how photography itself is marketed to consumers, in both the physical form of cameras and film and, more recently, in a virtual form (Slater 1999).
