Ariella Azoulay (2008) shifted attention from the photographer to the social relation created by the photograph. In The Civil Contract of Photography, she argues that photographs involve photographed people, photographers, and viewers in a civic relation. Viewers therefore have duties, not just feelings, when faced with images of harm or injustice.
Roland Barthes (1981) treated photography as a problem of meaning, memory, and loss. In Camera Lucida, he distinguishes between the studium, the broad cultural interest of a photograph, and the punctum, the detail that wounds or pierces the viewer. He also argues that every photograph carries the trace of “that-has-been”: the subject once stood before the camera, and this gives photography its stark link with time, death, and evidence.
Geoffrey Batchen (1997) questioned simple origin stories about the “invention” of photography. He argued that photography was desired before it was technically fixed, and that its history involves science, philosophy, culture, and longing, not just a list of inventors and processes.
Walter Benjamin (1936) argued that photography changed art by breaking the tie between an image and its unique time and place. Mechanical reproduction weakens the “aura” of the original, but it also makes images more public, mobile, and political. This is central to later debates about mass media, propaganda, and the loss of artistic authority.
John Berger (1972) developed Benjamin’s point for the age of mass media. In Ways of Seeing, he argued that images do not carry fixed meanings. Their meanings shift when they move into books, adverts, television, galleries, or private use. He also stressed that looking is shaped by class, gender, power, and prior belief.
Victor Burgin (1982) brought semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis into photography theory. He treated photographs as signs within wider systems of language, desire, ideology, and viewing. For Burgin, a photograph does not merely show the world; it joins social codes that teach us how to read it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952) gave photography one of its most famous practical ideas: the “decisive moment”. For him, the photographer must recognise the instant when form, gesture, meaning, and movement briefly cohere. His theory is less textual than practical. It stresses patience, timing, composition, and visual instinct, while treating the small handheld camera as a tool for alert, mobile attention.
Vilém Flusser (1983) treated the camera as an “apparatus” that shapes what can be made. His key point was that photographers do not simply express themselves through cameras; they also play within programmes built into technical systems. This has become more useful in the age of phones, platforms, presets, and AI.
Rosalind Krauss (1982) challenged the neat placement of photography within art history. She stressed photography’s indexical quality – its physical trace of what stood before the camera – but also argued that photographs work within different “discursive spaces”, such as science, survey, archive, gallery, or art market.
Martha Rosler (1981) gave one of the sharpest critiques of documentary photography. She argued that liberal documentary can turn poverty and pain into moral display for privileged viewers. Her point was not that documentary should end, but that it must confront power, class, authorship, and the uses to which images are put.
Allan Sekula (1986) attacked the idea that photographs speak for themselves. He argued that photographs gain meaning through archives, captions, institutions, police systems, labour, and state power. His work matters because it links photography to class, work, bureaucracy, and social control.
Susan Sontag (1979) argued that photography shapes how modern people see, consume, and judge the world. In On Photography, she claims that cameras turn experience into images and can make suffering, beauty, war, poverty, and travel available for repeated viewing. Her concern is ethical as well as cultural: photographs can sharpen moral attention, but they can also dull it by turning pain into spectacle or habit.
John Szarkowski (1966) gave photography a formal language. In The Photographer’s Eye, he framed photography around the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. His key point was that photographs have their own visual grammar, not just a weaker version of painting.
References
Azoulay, A. (2008). The civil contract of photography. Zone Books.
Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang. Original work published 1980.
Batchen, G. (1997). Burning with desire: The conception of photography. MIT Press.
Benjamin, W. (1936/1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. BBC and Penguin.
Burgin, V. (Ed.). (1982). Thinking photography. Macmillan.
Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The decisive moment. Simon and Schuster.
Flusser, V. (1983/2000). Towards a philosophy of photography. Reaktion Books.
Krauss, R. (1982). Photography’s discursive spaces: Landscape/view. Art Journal, 42(4), 311–319.
Rosler, M. (1981). In, around, and afterthoughts: On documentary photography. In 3 works. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Sekula, A. (1986). The body and the archive. October, 39, 3–64.
Sontag, S. (1979). On photography [Graphic]. Penguin Books.
Szarkowski, J. (1966). The photographer’s eye. Museum of Modern Art.