Photography theory - which are the most borrowed texts?

I recently ran a report to see which of the photography theory books are most frequently borrowed from the library.  The following list shows the top twenty for the previous two years.  Camera lucida came top.

See all the books (in A-Z order) on Library Search here.


Family snaps : the meaning of domestic photography
Jo Spence; Patricia Holland
London : Virago 1991

Photography theory
James Elkins
London : Routledge 2007

The art of interruption : realism, photography, and the everyday
John Roberts (John Charles)
Manchester; New York : Manchester Universtiy Press 1998

Light matters : writings on photography
Vicki Goldberg
New York : Aperture 2005

The photograph as contemporary art
Charlotte Cotton
London : Thames & Hudson c2004

Why photography matters as art as never before
Michael Fried
New Haven : Yale University Press 2008

Spectral evidence : the photography of trauma
Ulrich Baer
Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT 2002

The spoken image : photography and language
Clive Scott
London : Reaktion 1999

Over exposed : essays on contemporary photography
Carol Squiers
New York : New Press 1999

Photography and cinema
David Campany
London : Reaktion 2008

Stillness and time : photography and the moving image
David Green; Joanna Lowry
Brighton : Photoworks / Photoforum 2006

Photography : the key concepts
David Bate
Oxford : Berg 2009

The cinematic
David Campany
London : Whitechapel ; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press 2007

On photography
Susan Sontag 1933-2004
London : Penguin 2002

Art and photography
David Campany
London : Phaidon 2003

Photography : a critical introduction
Liz Wells 1948-
4th ed. London : Routledge 2009

The burden of representation : essays on photographies and histories
John Tagg
Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press 1993

The photography reader
Liz Wells
London : Routledge 2003

Thinking photography
Victor Burgin
London : Macmillan 1982

Camera lucida : reflections on photography
Roland Barthes
London : Vintage 1993, 1981

OER (Open Educational Resources)

This is a quick post for academic staff rather than students.  If you've heard of 'OER's, and want to know more, have a look at a very natty guide from Jisc.  Available here: A guide to open educational resources.

The film that changed my life

If I had a spare million, I'd snap up one of the super flats at the Barbican.  Not purely for the wonderful cinemas at the complex, but it would definitely be one of the reasons.  Their new film series presents fourteen life-changing films selected and introduced by well-known critics. 'The Films that changed my life' starts in April.

Films and the critics who chose them...
The Battle of Algiers introduced by David Gritten
Hamlet introduced by Nicholas Kenyon
The 400 Blows introduced by Sukhdev Sandhu
Raging Bull introduced by Peter Bradshaw
Celine and Julie Go Boating introduced by Jonathan Romney
The Garden introduced by Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
First Men in the Moon + East of Sudan introduced by Kim Newman
I Know Where I'm Going! introduced by Kate Muir
A Night to Remember introduced by Jenny McCartney
Ship of Theseus introduced by Derek Malcolm
The Lady Eve introduced by Wendy Ide
Bad Day at Black Rock introduced by Philip French
If... introduced by Dave Calhoun
Annie Hall introduced by Jason Solomons

Effective Research Skills - workshop

Do you know how to research effectively?  Is there room for improvement?

I will be running an Effective Research Skills workshop, as part of the Learning and Academic Skills Support programme next Monday (the full list of sessions is available here).

This workshop has been created to help you:

•    Know what research is and what skills contribute to successful research
•    Know how to identify authentic, reliable and accurate sources of information that are relevant to your area of study
•    Analyse the process of research and the strategies involved in that process

All students are welcome (all subjects; all levels) and there is no need to book.  The full details are:

Effective Research Skills Workshop
Monday 18th February 2013
A-Block, Harrow (A1.6)
12pm- 2pm

If you are interested in attending, but can't make this time and date, please drop me a line and I will let you know when the session is running again.

Further reading

Chambers, E. and Northedge, A. (1997).  The arts good study guide, 2nd ed.  Open University Press. 

Pretentious, Moi?

'A User's guide to Artspeak' in The Guardian on Monday discussed an essay written by an artist and a critic, on what they describe as 'International Art English.'  In brief, this is the sort of wordy, imitative and pretentious language that you too often come across in writing on art (although you might also add cultural studies and philosophy too).  To paraphrase a sentence from the essay, it is language that asks for more than to be understood - it demands to be recognised.

The original essay is very interesting on the possible genealogy of this language, its peculiar lexicon, syntax and use.  And for anyone who has ever struggled with this stuff (and haven't we all?) it's pretty funny too.

By coincidence, this Monday's Start the Week programme on Radio 4 was a special on Political Writing, which took George Orwell's essay 'Politics and the English Language' as its starting point.  Orwell famously offered the following six rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 

However, it is two sentences from his conclusion that I'm most impressed by:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

As Alix Rule and David Levine suggest in the essay referred to above, a certain kind of academic writing can be more about showing that you belong to particular tribe, than it is about communicating something original about a topic.  It is this sort of posing that one should try to avoid.

Consider, for example, Mathew Reisz writing last year about scholarly work on his father - Karel Reisz:

Some of the analysis seems overly elaborate or to miss the point. Even stranger is the stuff I simply can't understand. While there are vast amounts of academic writing in technical or specialist areas I obviously can't follow, it seems peculiar not to be able to decipher what someone is saying about my own father and his films.

It is possible to write lucid and incisive academic work, which gives proper weight to the complexity of any given topic.  There is lots of good writing out there (as well as bad), so why would anyone bother with the boringly pretentious?

Helen Sword, whose book Stylish academic writing was published last year, identified a number of myths which seemed to be preventing academics writing better.  These include: 'Academic writing has to be difficult,' and 'Academic writing has to be dense' (there is more on this here).  So, it's no wonder that some academic writing is both dense and difficult.

Since writing this post, I have been sent a link to the publisher's page for Helen Sword's book.  It includes links to some of the interviews etc which she did last year, and also to the interesting video about 'nominalizations' below.  I have to confess I have never heard of nominalizations before, but I will be on the look out for them now.  I can think of one particularly irritating example already.