ABSTRACT
Photography permeates all aspects of the life, acting as a principal source and repository of information about our world of experience. It follows that historical, theoretical and philosophical explorations of photographs as images and objects, and of photography as a range of types of practice operating in varying contexts, are necessarily wide-ranging. In the 1920s, when Moholy-Nagy commented on the future importance of camera literacy, he could hardly have anticipated the extent to which photographic imagery would come to permeate contemporary communication. In recent years this has been marked both by the astonishing speed of innovation and by a rapid extension and incorporation of technologies within new social, cultural, political and economic domains. Central to the nineteenth-century debate about the nature of photography as a new technology was the question as to how far it could be considered to be art.
