ABSTRACT
This book sets out to highlight the scope, breadth and variety of current thinking on photography, a cultural form that has been the subject of intense academic investigation in recent years. But it does so with a deliberate nod to Thinking Photography, the volume of essays on photography edited by Victor Burgin and rst published in 1982. Burgin’s book was intended explicitly to establish a theoretical framework for the study of photography. It featured contributions from both contemporary writers and critics such as John Tagg, Allan Sekula and Burgin himself, as well as essays by Walter Benjamin and Umberto Eco chosen by Burgin as necessary reference points for thinking about photography. To a certain extent, the very fact that we can now talk comfortably in terms of photography as a eld of study suggests that the work of academic and intellectual legitimation to which Thinking Photography was intended to contribute has paid o.
