ABSTRACT
Many of the key arguments for the usefulness of photography have been dismantled by post-modern thinking; for instance, the idea of photography as a truthful, objective and disinterested medium. This chapter presents these issues at stake, and many more, from war photography to activism, via advertising, family albums, architectural photography and the history of the photo booth. It focuses on overlooked images taken for practical purposes, co-edited by the Dutch multi-talent Erik Kessels, a publisher, artist, provocateur and co-founder of the advertisement company KesselsKramer. War photography is a sub-genre of photojournalism, whose most basic, primary tenet is to function within the realm of the actual. Hence war photography and photojournalism rely more urgently than other forms of photography on the modes and means of dissemination of the work after it is made. As newspapers (1853–1856) began to disappear over the next fifteen years, more and more war photographers and photojournalists were self-publishing and seeking independent funding.
