New Research on Photography as Art

New Research on Photography as Art

This is a bit of a secret project. Well, it’s really only secret in that I don’t want to give away exactly what it’s for in case I get swamped with my current PhD work and it takes several years (decades?) to pull off. I’m tentatively starting to research a thesis on how we think about photography as art, building on what I learned in my Masters by Research thesis that questioned how and why videogames might be considered art (and what that could mean for engaging more women artists).

I don’t know exactly what my aims and objectives will be for this thesis will be yet, I am at the stage where I’m going to read the literature, begin a literature review, and see what questions jump out at me. I expect I’ll know more in a few months time when I’ve read some books and made some notes.

So here, below, is my initial reading list. It is partially created from my own research and partially created from the generous help of participants in the FlakPhoto Network.


Andre Bazin. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. In What Is Cinema?, 1945.

Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Bell, Clive. Art. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by James Amery Underwood. Penguin Books Great Ideas. London: Penguin, 2008.

Campany, David. On Photographs, 2020.

Cavedon‐Taylor, Dan. ‘The Epistemic Status of Photographs and Paintings: A Response to Cohen and Meskin’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 2 (2009): 230–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01350_3.x.

Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Third edition. World of Art. New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Danto, Arthur C. What Art Is, 2014. https://archive.org/details/whatartis0000dant_a5q0.

Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment: A Book about Photography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2012.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.

Galassi, Peter. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York : Boston: Museum of Modern Art ; Distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1981.

Gaut, Berys. ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’. In Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Gaut, Berys Nigel. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Pbk. [ed.]. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gelder, Hilde van, and Helen Westgeest. Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Grundberg, Andy. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 2010.

Grundberg, Andy. How Photography Became Contemporary Art: <br>. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Habermas, Jürgen, and Thomas Burger. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Reprinted. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

Handy, Ellen, Brian Lukacher, and Shelley Rice. Pictorial Effect Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson. Norfolk, Va: Chrysler Museum, 1994.

Hatt, Michael, and Charlotte Klonk. Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

Jones, Amelia, and Erin Silver, eds. Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Maynard, Patrick. ‘The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 2 (1983): 155–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/430660.

‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’. Accessed 28 February 2021. https://www.artforum.com/print/197501/on-the-invention-of-photographic-meaning-37302.

Arnheim, Rudolf. “On the Nature of Photography.” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (1974): 149-61. Accessed February 28, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342924.

Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’. In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 4th ed., 233–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Reilly, Maura and Thames and Hudson. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Reynolds, Joshua, and Robert R. Wark. Discourses on Art. New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) Ltd. by Yale University Press, 1997.

Sealy, Mark. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, 2019.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Pearson Always Learning. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

Stieglitz, Alfred, Sarah Greenough, and Juan Hamilton. Alfred Stieglitz, Photographs & Writings. 1st ed. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983.

Tolstoy, Leo, and Aylmer Maude. What Is Art?, 2014.

Traub, Charles, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, eds. The Education of a Photographer. New York: Allworth Press, 2006.

Walton, Kendall L. ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’. Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984): 246–77.

Warburton, Nigel. The Art Question. London ; New York: Routledge, 2003.

Weaver, Jane Calhoun, and Paul Avrich Collection (Library of Congress), eds. Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings. Lannan Series of Contemporary Art Criticism 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Williams, Val. The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain 1900 to the Present. Repr. London: Virago, 1994.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Philosophical investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

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