An exploration of the relationship between how photographs are made available to the public and how they are received and understood.

Do we understand a photograph differently if we encounter it in a newspaper rather than a book? In a photo album as opposed to framed on a museum wall? The “Public” Life of Photographs explores how the various ways that photographs have been made available to the public have influenced their reception. The reproducibility of photography has been the necessary tool in the creation of a mass visual culture. This generously illustrated book explores historical instances of the “public” life of photographic images—tracing the steps from the creation of photographs to their reception.

The contributors—international curators and scholars from a range of disciplines—examine the emergence of photography as mass culture: through studios and public spaces; by the press; through editorial strategies promoting popular and vernacular photography; and through the dissemination of photographic images in the art world. The contributing authors discuss such topics as how photographic images became objects of appropriation and collection; the faith in photographic truthfulness; Life magazine's traveling exhibitions and their effect on the magazine's “media hegemony”; and the curatorial challenges of making vernacular photographs accessible in an artistic environment.

The “Public” Life of Photographs is the first volume in a series called RIC Books, which is copublished by MIT Press and the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC). The RIC, located at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, is a museum dedicated to the exhibition, research, study and teaching of photography and related disciplines.

Contributors
Geoffrey Batchen, Nathalie Boulouch, Heather Diack, André Gunthert, Sophie Hackett, Vincent Lavoie, Olivier Lugon, Mary Panzer, Joel Snyder

Thierry Gervais' profile page

Thierry Gervais is Assistant Professor at Ryerson University and Head of Research at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), Toronto.

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press.

An excellent complement to any history of photography, this collection expands on two centuries of questions/answers about the making and using of photographs.—CHOICE connect—