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Rating: 
Summary: If Your Interest Is Photography, Don't Waste Your Money
Review: I picked up this book with great anticipation. I briefly skimmed through the pages, browsing over the relatively good reproductions of famous photographs. Since it was an Oxford book, I expected a fairly informative book on the history of the photograph. What did I get for my money and effort? Well, that evening, after putting the children to bed and opening a fairly good bottle of Australian Shiraz, I settled into my chair to begin reading. Within minutes I knew I shouldn't have bought the book. If I'd wanted to read someone's second-rate rehash of the last 30 years of literary and artistic theory, I certainly could have picked a writer with a much more engaging writing style. To put it bluntly, the critiques of the photos made me very tired: didactic, jargon-filled, and lacking in originality. . . I felt like I was back in graduate school listening to some banal graduate student who, after three semesters, has finally understood the basic tenets of deconstuctionism or academic marxism. Many hours later into the night, my wine glass empty, I shut the book. I felt victimized by Mr. Clarke's limited critical range and tedious political agenda. And I was sad: while there is a need to critique the political agendas of photography as an art form and photographers in general, Clarke makes little use of modern critical methods to help us understand the aesthetics of the art form. This, coupled with an overly academic writing style, leads to a very tiresome book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, save perhaps, a dull graduate student just beginning to understand the rudiments of critical theory. P.S. In just looking at the cover, potential reader, do your own semiotic analysis. The photo is analagous to Mr. Clarke. He's turned his back away from his reader and the art form he seeks to help us understand.
Rating:
Summary: If Your Interest Is Photography, Don't Waste Your Money
Review: I picked up this book with great anticipation. I briefly skimmed through the pages, browsing over the relatively good reproductions of famous photographs. Since it was an Oxford book, I expected a fairly informative book on the history of the photograph. What did I get for my money and effort? Well, that evening, after putting the children to bed and opening a fairly good bottle of Australian Shiraz, I settled into my chair to begin reading. Within minutes I knew I shouldn't have bought the book. If I'd wanted to read someone's second-rate rehash of the last 30 years of literary and artistic theory, I certainly could have picked a writer with a much more engaging writing style. To put it bluntly, the critiques of the photos made me very tired: didactic, jargon-filled, and lacking in originality. . . I felt like I was back in graduate school listening to some banal graduate student who, after three semesters, has finally understood the basic tenets of deconstuctionism or academic marxism. Many hours later into the night, my wine glass empty, I shut the book. I felt victimized by Mr. Clarke's limited critical range and tedious political agenda. And I was sad: while there is a need to critique the political agendas of photography as an art form and photographers in general, Clarke makes little use of modern critical methods to help us understand the aesthetics of the art form. This, coupled with an overly academic writing style, leads to a very tiresome book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, save perhaps, a dull graduate student just beginning to understand the rudiments of critical theory. P.S. In just looking at the cover, potential reader, do your own semiotic analysis. The photo is analagous to Mr. Clarke. He's turned his back away from his reader and the art form he seeks to help us understand.
Rating: 
Summary: Toiletworthy
Review: I've read scores of books about photo history and criticism but have rarely encountered such an unbearable load of relentlessly postmodernist-deconstructionist-postcolonialist-genderbending cultural theory. Certainly there is room for such perspectives and they may provide certain insights into certain photographic subject matter. I welcome and applaud such efforts when they are well done. But please, if occasionally a cigar is just a cigar, can't the same be true of a humble photograph? Alas, no. At least not to Clarke, who sees every photo as built on a foundation of past political incorrectness, which he proceeds to survey like an archeologist examining the strata of a Pompein latrine. Viewing what purports to be the entirety of the history of photography in this monocular manner leaves us in this case with no history of photography at all. Clarke's shrill voice and accusing finger would be insufferable even if the reader didn't get the distinct impression that Clarke believes himself to be delivering the most stunning elucidation of fundamental human truths since Aristotle peripatetically paced about the Lyceum. Given what Oxford may well have offered in such a volume, this fatuous manifesto is all the more a pity.
Rating: 
Summary: The politics of photography
Review: No man can write out of his bourne of time and space,but the author clearly displays his contemperary trendy left wing biases to the point that his essay on the art of looking at photographs is somewhat occluded. His illustrations are not irrelevant, but his neglect of photography within the last 15 years or so is difficult to justify Altogether well below the usual high standards of the Oxford Companions
Rating: 
Summary: The Photograph by Graham Clarke
Review: While no criticsm can be complete, this book offers one of the best points of departure for anyone trying to understand the history of the photograph. It is at times outdated in its thinking, but it is always thought provoking. If you're serious about looking at photographs, you must read this book.
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