Excuse the pig German. This is not so much a post, more of a thought which has struck me more than once over the last few years.

At home I have a shoebox full of family memorabilia, documents, photos, letters, etc. My sisters have even more such archive material. I spoke to a blogger friend recently and we looked at his photo records of family from the last 100+ years.

My point is, what happens now? We all have a huge amount of irreplaceable family and social documents stored on our computers or on servers around the world.

Where is that shoebox now, one that future generations can leaf through? The big institutes and concerns have a plan of course, but what about us? Anyone thought about this? Made a Will recently?

* The quote comes from Bertold Brecht /Kurt Weill - "Nanna's Lied"

"Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend?
Wo ist die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?"

"Where are the tears from yesterday evening?
Where are the snows of yesteryear?"

Over the next few weeks (months probably) I will be embarking on a potentially fretful and dangerous Odyssey. Organising my photo archive into some kind of manageable system. This is commonly called Digital Asset Management, and although I'm wary of industry buzzwords I guess this one will stay, so from now on it's DAM.

I'm not new to this - I realised many years ago that it was a necessary process for anyone serious about their photography in the digital age. I invested in Extensis Portfolio way back in 2000 and have investigated many other software options. So how come, 8 years (and umpty-thousand images) later, am I just getting started? One of the main reasons is that I was never satisfied with any of the software options, and as someone coming from an IT background I was aware that tying yourself into a proprietary system could be a real PITA. Since then the industry has moved on quite a bit, in particular the emergence of technologies and standards such as XMP and DNG. Although these have been the offspring of Adobe, I feel confident that they will become true open standards.

Why does this matter? I feel now that the core of the DAM process can be implemented free of any particular software or proprietary technology. This hopefully will give a permanence to any decisions I make today about cataloguing and organising my images. The bottom line? All the relevant data needed to keep track of your images is stored in the files themselves, and you only ever have one primary source for the image - the DNG file - not multiple versions hanging around all over the place.

This won't be news to a lot of people, and quite a few people will disagree with my optimism about the future of these standards. However, I need to get started on this stuff, and I'm happy with the current state of affairs. For anyone who doesn't have a clue what I'm on about, I'm going to blog about this particular journey, documenting my problems, decisions and hopefully successes over the next few weeks and months. Maybe some of that will be useful to others

For the first installment, my next blog will be about "The mess that I'm in now". Some folks might recognise the scenario.

I've resurrected my blog surfing activities, inspired by some suggestions from fellow photographers. The first interesting blog I stumbled across was Conscientious. A relevant "heads up" type of blog, not dogmatic, but interspersed with some intelligent and reasoned observations.

In a post about the censorship of some Bill Henson images I noted the following paragraph by the author, and nodded my head.

Art shows are being shut down, all the while corporations sell padded bras for little children, and parading the bodies of extremely young women in fashion shows is seen as, well, just part of that business. It seems to me that maybe we need to set some priorities and see where we can find the worst abuses of children and adolescents, before we have the police storm art shows. Just an idea.

I could equally have shaken it.

I first came across the work of Ansel Adams in the 70's, when I was a student, and a lot of time was spent browsing bookshops and arty type establishments. I remember being struck by the clarity of the images and the distinctive black and white treatment, but I didn't engage much more with them and I hadn't yet developed an interest in the nature of photography. Over the years since then my interest in landscape photography dwindled, and my memories of the Adams images were consigned to a vaguely felt "nice but sterile" category. Like most people I never ever saw any of the original prints.

Recently the opportunity arose to revisit his work at the Ansel Adams exhibition in Edinburgh, brought there by the efforts of Scottish landscape photographer Lindsay Robertson, some of whose work is shown along with 150 original Adams prints from the 20's to the 60's.

It was quite an eye-opener for me. I was prepared to be disappointed for the reasons mentioned above. I have seen, and taken, too many landscape photographs that fail to capture the essence that impresses you about nature. It seems that with the realist approach all you need to do is point the camera at nature, once you have found it. It never worked for me. However the devil is in the detail and unlike others it's obvious that Adams never just "pointed his camera" at the subject.

Two main points struck me as important in distinguishing his work.

The images are all compositionaly interesting, striking or classical, but there is also an indefinable ingredient that is difficult to pin down. He captured not just what he saw, but a sense of being there and feeling something that never fails to resonate somewhere with us when we look at the work. The viewpoints and subjects are, I suspect meticulously chosen, and probably involved a bit of hiking around and trial and error to find the ideal spot. Although he used a variety of lenses, the technology never intrudes - we never find ourselves asking what lens did he use for that effect, something that is often the first thing to strike us about modern landscapes especially where wide angles and prominent foreground objects predominate.

A second characteristic that raises these photographs above the ordinary is the processing. These days it would be called post processing. Nowadays we can select any image at random and apply an arsenal of techniques to enhance or turn it into something "better" or something else. What Adams did was slightly different. He saw, or "visualised" the finished print at the time of capture - so it was almost pre-processing. To produce the negative that he knew he could use in the darkroom to create the vision that he had at the time. Nothing stops you doing this with modern techniques, but it does require the vision at the time of capture. I suspect many of the beautifully enhanced images that we see today emerge as a result of seeing what you can do with what you have in the can. For this reason many modern landscapes are missing that indefinable spirit that Adams has. His prints have a great feeling of continuity, of connection as viewer with the artist at the moment of his vision.

It has been commented before, but there is indeed a slight melancholic refrain in the background of his work. Maybe it's just that nature humbles us with our short lifespans, or perhaps it comes from his lifelong protective sense for the environment.

On a phsyical side, the prints themselves look fabulous, once your eyes have become accustomed to gloom of the gallery space. I recommend giving yourself a good twenty minutes before starting to move around the exhibition. Some could do with being remounted, but that's a small gripe.

Lindsay Robertson is obviously a fine photographer, and I hope he would not mind me saying that looking at his work rather underlines what is different about Adams, particularly when his prints come at the end of the show. Many of the photos do seem to have the "point the camera at a beautiful landscape" feel about them, and yet they capture little more than the view. An obsession with size does them no favours, and tends to feel a bit bombastic. However, he has a difficult muse to live up to to, and we must thank him for his efforts in bringing the work over here

The exhibition is on until the 20th April and I can highly recommend it

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Ok - time for a minor rant.

[rant follows]

Auto Exposure should be banned. Had a discussion with someone today about their new DSLR and all it's fancy things that it does for you. No mention of Auto Exposure, more about things like "smile recognition". A lot of people seem to regard AE as some kind of natural law. Every time they take a photo, the camera has to decide on the correct exposure. As if it changes every second. More wrong exposures than ever, even if you have come to terms with the cameras various metering modes and which to use in which situation and assuming you can change it quickly enough and remember to switch it back. What rubbish.

In most shooting situations the lighting is relatively constant. It varies between light and shadow so most important is the exposure range. If you are shooting in high contrast or low light situations AE isn't going to be your saviour and you need to be a good photographer anyway and then you don't need to worry about AE.

Mostly these fine things don't matter. Find the general exposure for the shoot, set the camera on manual, and then adjust up and down if necessary for shadows and highlights. Concentrate on framing and focusing. When you set the manual mode make a conscious decision about wide aperture or slow shutter speed etc.... learn about how photography works

Ha - well I was going to talk about vernacular photography, but before I did, I remembered this blog post. You may already know it, and it's pretty funny, but the most interesting thing about it is when you take all the photographers names away, and then go back and see if the comments are all still so funny. That then is the tenuous link with the title of this post. What if we "found" some of these photos in an old cardboard box somewhere - or any famous photos....

Actually it's just as well I made this detour because I still haven't figured out this vernacular photography thing or where I stand on it. That doesn't normally stop me though....

This is the title of a photoblog by Gerry Gomez, and was pointed out to me by a friend. (How do we find new and interesting photographs? That's the subject of another post)

©G Gomez 2008

I look at a lot of photographs on the web, most of them are pretty good, and it makes you wonder how to make sense of what people are doing with the camera these days. Because he was recommended to me, maybe I paid a bit more attention than I would have done if I'd stumbled upon the site myself, however there is something about the images. and especially the procession of the images that kept me turning the page. First of all, there is no commentary, no titles and little explanation other than the occasional headline. The photos have to speak for themselves.

©G Gomez 2008

There are no obvious hard hitting images here, there are no jokes and there are no formal compositional devices just for their own sake. There is variety, and obvious thematic motifs.

©G Gomez 2008

I've chosen to show three portraits to give you an idea, but the scope of his work is much more than this. Many thanks to Gerry for allowing me to publish his photos here. I recommend that you go and have a look yourself

I was recently in Edinburgh, and visited Stills Gallery in Cockburn Street. I've often passed the gallery, but never realised that as well as regular photo exhibitions, they have fantastic resources available. Wet darkrooms and digital workstations for rental (Including Imacon Flextight scanner), computers for internet access, free public wi-fi, a photo library and meeting area with comfy chairs and nice relaxed atmosphere.

Worth dropping in - very helpful staff as well. (The website appears to be still under construction)

In Basel yesterday to have a look at the Andreas Gursky exhibition. I knew little about his work other than that the prints were very big and that one of them holds the current all time record for a photograph sold at auction (99c Diptych II - 3.4m dollars). So I confess to going along with rather jaundiced expectations, but as a photographer I wanted to judge for myself what all the fuss was about.

It is easy to form preconceived ideas about work you have never seen in person. There are some types of artwork which must be experienced face to face, rather than through reproductions. It makes a big difference to see works in an exhibition setting, especially with photographers where the style and intent is often only apparent from seeing a body of work arranged and selected. I experienced a similar thing with the large canvases of Mark Rothko, which have a strange almost physical resonance when you are in their presence, and look just plain stupid on the printed page. So it was with Gursky.

There are 25 recent works in the exhibition. Yes they are big, but their big-ness is not a result of just making the image bigger. Although many are manipulated and are composed of multiple images, on the whole they are representational and show us real views and situations. However they are views of real life that we never really see ourselves, because they encompass huge areas of space that the eye doesn't normally scan. In addition many, but not all, are taken from viewpoints not available to you and me (cranes, helicopters).

You can look at the pictures from a normal viewing distance, some meters away, this often produces an abstract effect, it is like looking at a landscape from very far away. As you move in closer it as if you were scanning that same landscape with a pair of binoculars. All the pictures are crammed with details that you only see on close inspection, and from a viewpoint where the entire composition is no longer available. In some of the images the detail is just that - small details multiplied countlessly, such as an image of a cycle race (Tour de France), or a vast archipelago of small islands dotted here and there with the traces of human occupation. In his recent F1 Pit Stop pictures, they are again crammed, but this time with activities rather than fine-ness of detail - so much going on.

I might have ascribed this to a certain technique which impresses the first time you see it, but becomes tedious. However the thing that won me over to the exhibition, and the work, is the variety that he brings to the subjects. Some motifs are repeated - the pit-stops for example, but in that case this only reinforces the power of the image - identical situations, but slightly different in each. There are many ways to look at this. An obvious one is that the comment is about the rigorous procedure required to refuel and change the tyres, how it is performed again and again, by different groups of people, and the visual results are almost identical, but each has it's own characteristics. Aside from these series, and similar ones from open-air gatherings in Pyong-Yang, the exhibition is, as I said, fascinating in it's diversity. An image of a church interior contrasts a group of tiny figures with the huge stained glass windows (I'm not sure if it's an actual church interior). A photograph of the Bahrain F1 circuit in the desert looks at first site like a freely made gouache abstract, and only on close inspection reveals its true nature. Interior pictures of stock exchanges bustle with movement and energy. The interior of a nightclub provides an endless succession of groups of people under a sci-fi stage where small screens or mirrors reflect individual parts of the action.

The images are all digitally processed to subtly, or dramatically alter the colours and colour balance which gives a slight technical style to them, but while some people make a lot of this, I think it's a secondary effect compared to the content.

So I was surprised and enjoyed the exhibition a lot - I can recommend it. However you need to shut out the effects of the "Art Market" when you go and see something like this - otherwise you won't see the details for dollar bills.

Charis Wilson was the beautiful young woman whose collaboration with Edward Weston as lover, wife, model and muse resulted in some of his most iconic work. I was looking through his photographs recently, and two of them involving Charis struck me as an interesting contrast.

The first is well known, but it never fails to strike me with the unusual pose and the analogies with Westons sensuous still lifes. The parts of the body seem disconnected, yet the whole hangs together in a curious, egg shaped assembly. Weston was driven and inspired by sexuality, but there is a story of him poring over this image with a magnifying glass to make sure no pubic hair was showing before releasing it for publication - this had much more to do with the publishing rules of the time than any sense of prudery

The second, less well known image shows a fully clothed Charis. Now it may be my imagination, but I feel in this image he is almost taking a sidelong glance at the mores of the day, and of course this image is a much more erotic offering than the first one.

A mantra that goes around regularly when people discuss camera reviews and x vs y comparisons is "It's not the camera, it's the photographer". Now I think I know what people mean by this. They mean that a "great" camera doesn't guarantee a great photo, but a great photographer does. On the whole of course I agree with this. However like a lot of mantras it can sometimes be repeated unthinkingly, parrot fashion, and the meaning lost.

Sometimes it seems to me that people think the apparatus doesn't matter at all. This is rubbish for various reasons. Try giving a great sports photographer a field camera - he may come back with a great photo, but it won't be the one he or his editor wanted. The nature of the camera is very important when taking the job into account - you need the right tool. So that's one obvious reason why the camera is important.

A second reason, and one which I have discovered for myself after many years taking photographs with all sorts of gear, is that you have to at least feel comfortable with the camera. It also makes a big difference to me if I feel happy with the camera, if I'm in love, obsessed, infatuated with the camera. If I never want it out of my sight and if I insist on going everywhere with it. Ok that's an exaggeration, and points to my unhealthy psyche, but I think you know what I mean.

I have a nice Canon EOS5D with some nice Canon L lenses and I know "it" takes brilliant photographs. However it's sitting on the desk in front of me and I don't feel the urge to caress it and ask it go for a stroll into town with me. If there was a special subject in mind - an event or the like, then yes, I know it's the right tool for the job. But if I'm just cruising looking for the personal shots which give me the most satisfaction, I know I'll reach for my Leica, or maybe my OM1 with a particular favourite lens. Maybe also my little Rollei 35S. These cameras all make me feel like taking photographs. They get me in the mood. I feel they are an extension of my inner eye. They seem to connect me with the subject whereas the Canon always seems to be in between me and the subject.

The proof of the pudding is in the results. I'm sure everyone who has taken many many photographs with a variety of cameras is aware their best work often comes from a particular camera(s), irrespective of technical capabilities - is this a challenge? Anyone got any other ideas?

This ebay auction for a prototype M3 might make an interesting spectator sport. Bidding due to end in 8 hours or so (midnight 7th Oct UK time)

This was brought to my attention by The Online Photographer

Why, as a species, are we so inclined to take sides? Although not strictly a photographic question I'm posting it here because it sprang to mind when doing some web research on the Leica M8. I just acquired one myself and will be talking about it elsewhere, but a short trawl of the web revealed how polarised people are about the pros/cons of the camera, and the whole Leica "thing".

However this is nothing new, and what is probably more amazing is the partisanship that emerges when Nikon and Canon are compared. These are products that generally fill the same market, and aim to satisfy similar requirements, but people seem to be prepared to spill blood over it. The Leica is a niche product and making comparisons is fruitless.

I come from the IT industry, and I know that if I'm bored of an evening, all I have to do is go to some forum or other and post a reply saying "but if you used a MAC/PC (delete as appropriate)..." then sit back and watch battle commence.

As a teenager I was always aware that you were either inclined towards Dylan or Deep Purple. And it's more serious than that - do I need to mention BMW/Mercedes, Rangers/Celtic or Catholic/Protestant. What is it? I'm baffled - but I'm also one of the biggest culprits.

Jane Bown is familiar to all readers of the English Sunday paper "The Observer", even if many people only recognise the subjects and not the photographers name. Mainly portraits, and perversely taken with an old Olympus OM-1. Somehow or other she doesn't seem to be as famous as other photo celebrities, but I think she should be. I like her approach, (in the mould of Cartier Bresson) and she has some nice quotes - "The best pictures are uninvited, they're suddenly there in front of you ... easy to see but difficult to catch. some people take pictures, I find them" - I can relate to that.

An unusual, surprising portrait of Orson Welles, found at New York Books

She's been around along time, and The Guardian has a piece about her by Germaine Greer, as an introduction to a new book and exhibition they are hosting - "Unknown Bown - 1947 - 1967".

So how many memory cards do you need to shoot a wedding? Several more than you actually possess. Your shooting rate will increase automatically to fill up all the cards you have before that cake is even cut. I took 8 1gb cards and that was woefully short.

The problem of running out of card space is a real danger. It means that you are going to quickly try and free up space - deleting duds and duplicates by assessing them in-camera. In the hurly burly of the wedding you'll probably delete the wrong ones - or maybe nervous fingers will hit that "delete all" button by mistake. Or you just may run out of space entirely before you have all the shots.

Portable disk storage? For backing up, these or a laptop are essential. There are some nice models on the market, but I wonder how I would have got on transferring cards and reformatting them during the course of the event? Ok once you have some free time, but I don't fancy this sort of image transfer while in the thick of it. Again, I could foresee risks here. I had a laptop, and I took the opportunity later in the proceedings to back everything up, but by then all the big photo sessions were past. Another solution is to have a handy sidekick who you can just toss cards to as you fill 'em up and they can do it. A bit like the old pro's tossing their Hasselblad backs to and fro.

Rather than risk these problems, I would just take more cards, and for a similar event I would take twice as many. I would probably take 16 1gb cards. I don't fancy cards any bigger than that - I can imagine an 8gb card slipping out the fingers and down a drain at the crucial moment with c. 500 images on it. Even 2gb makes me feel jittery, but you have to make a trade-off between changing cards a lot and security. Actually I just saw that the new Nikon D3 has the ability to fill two cards at once. An automatic backup feature. In this case putting 2 8gb cards in seems a nice solution. However I don't have one of these.

Because things are sometimes happening quickly, you need to be pretty slick about changing cards. Put a new card in early if you know the action is going to start. Also, and this is probably obvious to everyone except me, devise a method of keeping used cards and full cards separate. Something sophisticated like putting full ones in your right pocket and empty ones in your left. And remember which is which. I had one embarrassing moment when I had to change a card quickly, and I put a full one back in. Meaning shouts of "wait a minute" "do it again" etc

I started seriously running out of space towards the end and I reverted to shooting JPEG instead of RAW. This gave me a lot more room, but I regretted it as soon as I started working on the images. I'm accustomed to underexposing and then adjusting in photoshop. With RAW fies this is a breeze - with JPEG it's not a good idea. I found many of the JPEGs couldn't be easily rescued without sacrificing something in terms of quality.

A few months ago I talked about shooting a family wedding and the logistical and management problems I encountered. I also came to a few conclusions about equipment and technical matters. Things that I would change if I did it again. Professionals won't find anything startling here, but someone in the same situation as me might find something useful.

I took quite a bit of equipment with me but I shot the whole thing using the following.

Canon EOS20D 17-85mm (34 shots)
Canon EOS5D all lenses (487 shots)
of which

• 16-35 F2.8L (125 shots)
• 24-70 F2.8L (309 shots)
• 70-200 F2.8L IS (52 shots)

This tells an interesting story. I took the EOS20D mainly as a backup, and in the end I didn't use it much. For example I didn't really use it as a second body - I preferred to change lenses on the EOS5D. When I did use it it was because I was running out of memory cards, but that's another story. In an ideal world I would take 2 EOS5D bodies. Why? I'm not sure, but I guess I found even the slight change in operation between the two a bit of a put-off, plus at the back of my mind I wanted all the images similar size/resolution. Maybe more a psychological thing this.

Assuming I had 2 EOS5D's, what lens combination would I use? Well I know that I put the 16-35 on the camera only to do group shots - so that didn't mean chopping and changing much - all of those were done in one or two continuous shoots. Quite a few of the group shots required wider than 24mm, although if possible I might have been better trying to use longer focal length in some to avoid distortion.

The 70-200mm was a different kettle of fish. I found I was often wanting to mount it because the 24-70mm wasn't quite long enough. I think now I know the attraction of the 24-105mm - it probably has just that extra amount of reach to avoid this.

However where I found the 70-200mm really useful was during the ceremony. I was allowed to shoot here as long as I remained at the back and was unobtrusive (no 600mm F4 then!). Here the lens worked very well, combination of handling, fast aperture and IS. I should say also that the EOS5D is a whole lot quieter than the EOS20D which sounds like a rifle shot in comparison.

The conclusion? 2 EOS5D's (or equivalent) with 16-35 and 24-105 would be my preferred set up if I did it again, with the 70-200mm for special shots.

In the next post I'll talk about some other technical and equipment issues (JPEG or RAW? Flash and tripods, memory cards and readers etc)

A couple of  posts ago I  described how my attempt to separate photographs from non-photographs was doomed. However since photography started people have been trying to cleave it down the middle. The early days of the genre were characterised by duels between the "realists" and the "pictorialists". This is still one of the main arguments when trying to pin down photographs.

The second chapter of Edwards book is titled "Documents and Pictures" and goes into some detail about the history and preoccupation with this theme. A document describes and a picture romanticises, one is factual, the other creative. Well, not quite. I think Willy Ronis once said that photography was closer to literature than to painting. He was on the realist, documentary side of the argument. Jeff Wall would be on the other.

The famous curator John Swarowski tried to refine this division by saying photographs were either "windows" or "mirrors". It seems to me though that this is just restating the same argument. The window shows the subject (document) and the mirror reflects the artists ideas and intentions.

Both of these avoid the obvious point that documents, whether written or photographed are always selective on the part of the creator, and in doing so can be just as representative of the other side of the argument

I have seen the term "indexical sign" linked with photographic images before, but the contexts have always been difficult and I never had a clue what it meant. Steve Edwards "Photography. A very short introduction" explains rather nicely what it's all about. Rather he doesn't explain what it's all about, but he lets us in on why this term and the whole business of semiotics has a bearing on photography. This is one of the joys of books like this - they are not "dummies guides" and they are not "encyclopedias" - they give you enough information to get started, and open doors into the subject which you can choose to open and explore if you wish.

The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did a lot of work on the study of signs or semiotics. His basic premise was that all communication is carried out by what he called signs. (things that signify something). The whole business of semiotics is very complicated, and from what I can gather academic opinion is divided about it, as with many philosophical ideas that try to be objective about the human condition (how can we be?).  So I'm not going into that, and please, all the real philosophers out there - excuse my minimalist description of the subject. The application of semiotics to photography, as described by Edwards, is instructive. A much diluted version of Pierce's ideas can be expressed thus. Signs can be characterised by three distinct components, which may all be present in varying degrees depending on the sign.

Iconic signs in some way resemble what they signify - a pictogram for example. (In the computer age we are all familiar with icons). Symbolic signs represent the object they signify by some kind of a priori knowledge or convention. All language is composed of signs which are symbolic. The word "rainbow" signifies a rainbow, but unless I know the word it means nothing. Similarly a white flag is a symbolic sign by convention. It's fairly easy to see how these characteristics of signs can be applied to photographs. The third component is the indexical sign. This is a sign that is either made by the object it signifies, or somehow or other signifies the existence of the subject. A common example is a footprint. A sound uttered by a person would be an indexical sign, but also symbolic if it was interpretable by language or convention.

Edwards rightly points out the unique correlation in a photograph between iconic and indexical components. When we start thinking about the philosophy of photography, or ontological concerns such as "what is a photograph", these concepts can be useful. Not because they help categorise an image, but just that by thinking in terms like this we may arrive at a better way of rationalising our own ideas about a photograph, or photography in general. If we are concerned about the difference between analogue and digital images, or whether a photograph mirrors or represents reality, it is obvious that the idea of an indexical sign can be quite fruitful. At least I'm beginning to find this so.

I don't yet have a full grasp of this topic, so I'm not going to cut myself off at the knees by trying to apply these new found concepts in a practical way here, but I have a feeling that they will be helpful in the future. I'd be interested if anyone else has ideas about the subject - and also if I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether.

In the last post I described how I quickly became disillusioned with my attempt to charge like a white knight through the ranks of images, casting "photographs" to the right and "non-photographs" to the left. One of the books I've been reading recently is Steve Edward's "Photography: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2006)". If I'd read the first paragraph of his preface a while ago I'd have saved myself a lot of bother.

He writes:

"I must have been mad to agree to write this book; not least because the combination of 'very short introduction' with 'photography' seems like an oxymoron. The three or four standard histories of the medium are all huge volumes. The problem is simply that photography runs in all directions, permeating diverse aspects of society. Indeed it is difficult to find an area of modern life untouched by it."

Crucially for me he then goes on:

"The critic John Tagg once suggested that there was no single characteristic, or practice that represented the fundamental essence of the medium. Trying to account for photography as a whole was akin to attempting a history or a museum of writing: all that could be done was to trace the uses of photography (or writing) in the institutions in which it was put to work - the law courts, medicine, advertising, art and so forth"

Amen.

The book presents an excellent foot up for anyone wanting some ideas about how to start exploring the subject, history and philosophy of photography. It's a good series from OUP - not a "dummies guide" or "bluffers guide" but true introductions to weighty subjects by experts.