Books
Photography Decoded
(Tate/Ilex, 2019; co-authored with Hedy van Erp)
Photography Decoded draws on fifteen years of teaching and promotes accessibility to complex pictures and ideas. It aims to introduce images and debates to a wide audience through multiple methods of interpretation. Divided into ten chapters it takes issues that have long been pertinent to photography - such as realism, privacy and editing - and unpacks each photograph with a series of questions and close readings. Whilst considering the history, dissemination and context of many different types of photographs, it not only engages in visual literacy but also shows that what constitutes a photograph is in question more than ever.
Design: She Was Only
Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography
(Aperture, 2017)
Feast for the Eyes is a survey book of how food has been photographed. It shows that photographs of food are rarely just about food. They hold our lives and time up to the light. Many of the photographers in this book demonstrate that a the most obvious of subjects is often the most demanding, and photographs of food—much like food itself—can invoke deep-seated questions and anxieties about issues such as consumption, aspiration, tradition, gender, race, desire, wealth, poverty, pleasure, revulsion, and domesticity. Feast for the Eyes was short-listed for the Historical Book Award in the Arles Les Prix du Livre 2018.
For an inside look, click here
Editor Denise Wolff on Feast for the Eyes (video)
Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood
(Art / Books, 2013)
Published to coincide with the exhibition held at The Photographers’ Gallery and The Foundling Museum in London Home Truths examines contemporary interpretations of the image of the mother figure. Focusing on the work of twelve international artists, the publication challenges stereotypical or sentimental views of motherhood handed down by traditional depictions, and explores how images can be used to address changing conditions of power, gender, domesticity, the maternal body, and female identity. The work featured is highly personal, often documentary in approach with the individual subject at its centre. In addition the book contains art historical and autobiographical essays by Susan Bright, Nick Johnson, Simon Watney and Stephanie Chapman
Interviews with the artists (videos)
Auto Focus: The Self Portrait in Contemporary Photography
(Thames & Hudson, 2010)
Written on the brink of the selfie phenomenon Auto Focus was one of the first survey books to concentrate on self-portraiture in contemporary photography. The aim of the book was to be as international as possible and to include a wide range of photographers and artists from the very well known to the emerging or forgotten. It showed how issues of identity - whether national, sexual, racial, personal or artistic - are key to understanding the work of many of today's photographers. Divided into five chapters (Autobiography, Body, Masquerade, Studio and Album and Performance) it took as its premise that the self is a display of self-regard, self-preservation, self-revelation and self-creation open to interpretation by each individual viewer.
Other editions include: Monacelli Press (USA) and Contrasto (Italy)
How We Are: Photographing Britain
(Tate, 2007: co-authored with Val Williams)
Published to coincide with the exhibition How We Are at Tate Britain this book echoed the exhibition ‘chapters’ in a chronological form. Overlapping themes and preoccupations were identified and examined in more detail. These included a certain kind of melancholic nostalgia or ‘harking back’ in British photography, a love of the ordinary, and a desire to capture the fluid and elusive notion of Britishness. The act of photographing of Britain, in its many guises, played a vital role in the formation of its multi-faceted national identity.
TateShots (video)
Face of Fashion
(National Portrait Gallery, 2007)
Published to coincide with the exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery, Face of Fashion was published in different forms. The original printing consisted of a two-tone ray skin cover to mirror the seductive nature of the exhibition. Selling out quickly, it was reprinted with a photograph of one of the leading pictures of Kate Moss by Mario Sorrenti on the cover. The book allowed the context of the photographs to be explored in more depth, and the relationship between fashion and art, celebrity culture and ideas of collaboration in both editorial and advertising photography were focused on. The book featured all the works shown in the exhibition and had an additional essay by the American cultural commentator Vince Aletti.
Other editions include: Aperture (USA)
Design: Thomas Manss & Company
Art Photography Now
(Thames & Hudson, 2005; 2nd edition, 2011)
Art Photography Now was one of the first overviews of contemporary art photography and provides an extensive overview of eighty international artists who use photography as their primary medium. The book is divided into seven sections - Portrait, Landscape, Narrative, Object, Fashion, Document, and City - that explore the diverse subjects, styles, and methods of the leading practitioners. Introductions to each section outline the genres and consider why photographers are attracted to certain themes, and how issues like memory, time, objectivity, politics, identity, and the everyday are tied to their approaches.
Other editions include: Aperture (USA), Textual (France), Edition Braus (Germany), Nerea (Spain), Korea Price Information Corp (Korea), IDEAFried (Taiwan), Post Wave Publishing Consulting Ltd (China)