Photography History

• The History of Photography Calendar, featured at The Nearby CafŽ, provides day-by-day listings of notable events in the medium's history. You're welcome to contribute the ones you find most significant -- birthdates, death dates, publication dates, and other occasions that have highlighted the history (and prehistory) of photography.
• Dr. Robert Leggat's excellent and thorough A History of Photography from its beginnings till the 1920s contains basic information, references, images, and much more on the medium's first century.
• The American Photographic Historical Society's site offers much information and includes an excellent Related Links page.
• Jack and Beverly's Spirit Photography Links and Bibliography. Like it says. A. Conan Doyle, creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, believed this stuff, and you can too. From Jack and Beverly Wilgus, who also bring you:
• Magic Mirror of Life: An appreciation of the camera obscura. An excellent site with much information about this precursor of the photographic camera.

Photography Criticism

Photography Theory

• IRIS, the International Centre for Women in Photography, provides access to much information about women photographers past and present.
• "The camera never lies? The invention of the photograph and its effects on scientific discourse," by Diana Boyd.

Credos by Photographers

• M. Richard Kirstel: Photography. This website contains several noteworthy texts by this influential photographer and teacher, including a reminiscence about studying photography with Minor White, a commentary on photography as language, and a credo. Most recently, Peter Gabriel chose one of Kirstel's photographs as the signature image for his 2003 world tour.
• An exemplary one-person site, simply titled Jerry N. Uelsmann, provides an excellent introduction to this influential photographer's work, including a solid interview with him and the texts of his writings, including the germinal essays "Post-Visualization" (1967) and "Some Humanistic Considerations of Photography" (1971).

Interviews and Profiles

• Prague House of Photography Online, in The Nearby CafŽ Gallery, includes interviews with and profiles of numerous Czech and Slovak photographers not available elsewhere.
• "An Online Interview with Therese Mulligan, Curator of Photography, The George Eastman House, Rochester, NY," by Richard Leslie.
• Apogee Photo, self-described as "the Internet's Photo Magazine," offers its Photographer Profile Archives free to all. Includes material on John Sexton, Arnold Newman, and others.
• Scrutable or not? You decide! "Baudrillard on the New Technologies: An interview with Claude Thibaut," from 1996

Critics', Historians', and Theorists' Sites

• Not exactly a Frankfurt School home page, but here's Theodor Adorno's 1944 collaboration with Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightment as Mass Deception," from The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993), and his return thereto, "Culture industry reconsidered," from The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991)
• Jean Baudrillard, professional theorist and amateur photographer, doesn't seem to have his own home page, but he has plenty of material pertinent to photography floating around online. See, for example, "On the Murderous Capacity of Images" (1981), and "Plastic Surgery for the Other" (1994).
• A. D. Coleman's newsletter, C: the Speed of Light, at The Nearby CafŽ, was the first website posted by a photography critic, and is now the longest-running. Its posted essays formed the premise for this archive, which receives new essays from Coleman on a regular basis.
• Michel Foucault's examination of the Panopticon, from his book Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 195-228, is a central postmodern text on visuality. Here's that text, "Panopticism," in English translation by Alan Sheridan. Elsewhere you will find the entirety of his germinal text The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1997).
• Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) produced profoundly influential time-motion studies based on the theories of efficiency of labor propounded by Frederick Taylor. Their work, in turn, came out of the motion studies of Muybridge and Marey. All of this is explored in Michale Mulcahy's unusual hypermedia environment called Building Better Humans.
• Engin …zendes's Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1919, provides an excellent resource on this subject -- an exemplary historian's site, with first-rate design and great substance.

Online 'Zines

• Blind Spot includes texts by photographers and dialogues between photographers -- Vik Muniz talking with the Starn brothers, for example. Just go to the site and click on their "Back Issues" archive.
• Camera Austria Online: This long-running journal emphasizes the theoretical. Texts in German and English.
• SF Camerawork, a Bay Area non-profit organization, publishes Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts. This section of the organization's set doesn't offer texts, but it does provide tables of contents and editors' introductory notes for back issues, beginning in 1997.
• Greg Rubin's The Critical Eye appears online only.
• DoubleTake, formerly at Duke University and now Boston-based, has useful material up at its new site.
• European Photography is a semi-annual from Germany whose website, Equivalence, includes some theoretical texts from editor Andreas MŸller-Pohle and the late VilŽm Flusser, to whom a subsection of the site is dedicated.
• fineArtforum, online since 1987, is "the longest-running arts magazine on the Internet." With an emphasis on media arts and technology, it presents content that often addresses where photography is heading in the digital era.
• Katalog, a quarterly from Denmark, publishes in both English and Danish. Most of the material at this site is available to subscribers only, but some sections are open to all.
• LensWork Quarterly contains essays, credos, and portfolios by a diversity of authors and photographers.
• Leonardo On-Line is a Web version of this long-running journal concerning the relation of art and science. The important material in its archive is available to subscribers only; details are posted at the site. An index and excellent search engine help greatly.
• James Hugunin's U-Turn . . .
• No better guide to current exhibitions in the New York area exists than Photography in New York International. Includes A. D. Coleman's book-review column, "Visual Literacy," and some other texts.
• The Photo Review is a mid-Atlantic regional journal with national (and, indeed, international) perspective. This site includes no texts, but a comprehensive index to its back issues is forthcoming. You'll find work by Stephen Perloff, this journal's editor, here in the Archive; check his Author's Page.
• Pedro Meyer's ZoneZero includes a range of diverse texts from a number of authors, Max Kozloff among them.

Exhibition catalogue essays

• An exemplary online exhibition catalogue for "Image and Icon: The New Greek Photography, 1975 -1995," curated by John Stathatos for the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in 1997. A model of what can be done to use the web as an extension of intelligent curatorship. You'll find more work by Stathatos here in the Archive; check his Author's Page.
• And another: From the The Smithsonian American Art Museum, "Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype," curated by Merry Foresta.

Visual Anthropology and Visual Sociology

• Sociologist (Art Worlds), photographer, and quondam jazz pianist Howard S. Becker has established the modestly titled but richly endowed Howie's Home Page as a repository for his texts, photographic essays, and much more.
• Peter Berger . . .
• Visual anthropologist Paul Byers (1920-2001), who worked extensively with Margaret Mead (among others) and wrote at length on the theory and practice of visual anthropology, is represented online by a small home page from HervŽ Varenne, his colleague at Columbia University, where he taught for decades. It includes an obituary, a curriculum vitae, a short but important statement from him about his work ("Rhythms of Communication: An introduction to my research"), a valuable "Dissertation Talk," and a link to one of his most significant texts, the 1966 essay "Cameras Don't Take Pictures."
• Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has much to say about the observation of other cultures and the problematic role of the outside observer as commentator thereon. Herewith some pertinent samples: "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," from The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), a PDF download; "Ideology as a Cultural System," from Apter, David Ernest (ed.), Ideology and discontent (New York: Glencoe, 1964), pp. 47-76; "Art as a Cultural System" from the journal Modern Language Notes, Vol. 91, no. 6, pp. 1473-99 (Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press, 1976).
• Sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) was a photographer sans camera, a close and astute observer of the microbehaviors of urban people. He also produced the germinal study of the social construction of gender behavior through photography, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper, 1979). Such books of his as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), Relations in Public: Micro-Studies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971), and Frame Analysis: Essays on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper, 1974), have much to teach anyone who makes and/or uses photographs as traces of public behavior. Here are two chapters from the book that made his reputation, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: "The Arts of Impression Management" and "Presentation of Self."
• Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss deeply influenced all the observational disciplines with his structural approach to his field. Here are two chapters from Structural Anthropology (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, (1958): "Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology" and "The Structural Study of Myth."
• Jay Ruby is a professor of Anthropology and director of a graduate program in the anthropology of visual communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. His website, Jay Ruby's Home Page, offers a wealth of material on the subject of visual anthropology, including both theoretical texts and extensive samplings of Ruby's own image-text works in that discipline.
• One of the key works in visual anthropology is the late Sol Worth's Studying Visual Communication, edited and with an Introduction by Larry Gross (1981). Long out of print, it's offered here in a virtual version.