ABSTRACT
Categories are designed for different purposes, and they use various means to distinguish photographs. In the 1970s, Time-Life publications published the Life Library of Photography, a widely distributed series of books on making and looking at photographs. One book of the series is The Great Themes and it uses six categories to cover photography: the human condition, still life, portraits, the nude, nature, and war. This newer system uses five categories: photographs that are descriptive explanatory, interpretive, ethically evaluative, aesthetically evaluative, or theoretical. The categories have distinguishing characteristics, but photographs overlap them. Most explanatory photographs deal with subject matter that is specific to a particular time and place and that can be dated by visual evidence within the photograph. Interpretive photographs, like explanatory photographs, seek to explain how things are, but they do not attempt scientific accuracy, nor are they accountable to the rigors of scientific verification.
