I have become aware that a good deal of my teaching and research circles around the same question: who gets to decide what things mean?

It appears in photography when we ask why some images seem natural, truthful or beautiful while others seem strange. It appears in psychology when we examine how people come to understand themselves. It appears in education when we ask whether students should absorb established knowledge or learn to challenge it. It appears in coaching and psychotherapy when we consider whether the difficulties people bring with them belong to the individual alone, or reflect the social world in which they live.

Critical Theory gives these questions a shared intellectual home.

The term covers a broad and disputed tradition. Its roots lie in the Frankfurt School and the work of thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Later forms of critical thought draw from Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies and the work of writers such as Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, bell hooks and Stuart Hall.

These thinkers disagree about a great deal. What joins them is a refusal to treat the social world as neutral.

Horkheimer argued that a critical theory should do more than describe society. It should examine the forces that shape social life and ask whose interests they serve (Horkheimer, 1937/1972). This marks an important break from approaches that regard existing forms of knowledge, culture and social order as facts that simply need to be studied.

For my own work, that distinction matters.

Photography, for example, has often carried a claim to innocence. The photographer points the camera towards something and records what was there. Yet photographs do much more than record. Someone chooses where to stand, what to include, what to exclude and when to release the shutter. Editors select images. Institutions display them. Newspapers caption them. Algorithms distribute them. Viewers interpret them through their own cultural histories.

A photograph therefore does not merely show the world. It takes part in producing the meanings through which the world becomes known.

Walter Benjamin recognised part of this problem almost a century ago when he examined what happens to art when mechanical reproduction removes it from its traditional setting (Benjamin, 1936/2008). Later writers developed the argument much further. Stuart Hall, for example, showed how representation forms meaning rather than merely transmitting meanings that already exist (Hall, 1997).

This has major consequences for photographic education.

Teaching photography cannot stop at exposure, composition and visual style. We also need to ask why certain ways of seeing have become normal. Why do photographers repeatedly depict some groups as subjects and others as observers? Why do some landscapes become picturesque while others become sites of labour, conflict or neglect? Why are some bodies photographed as objects of desire, pity, fear or scrutiny?

Critical Theory gives us permission to ask these questions.

It also complicates psychology.

Psychology has often placed the individual at the centre of explanation. We study attitudes, personality, cognition, emotion and behaviour. These are important fields of study, but an exclusive focus on the person can conceal the structures within which people live.

An anxious worker may indeed have patterns of thought worth exploring. Yet that person may also have insecure work, high housing costs, weak social protection and little control over their working life. A psychological account that ignores those conditions risks turning a social problem into an individual defect.

The same issue arises in psychotherapy and coaching. Both can become tools through which people learn to adjust themselves to conditions that deserve criticism. Resilience provides an obvious example. Helping someone cope can be valuable. Yet there is something troubling about teaching people to become more resilient without asking why the environment demands so much resilience from them.

Critical thought asks a different question: what if the person is responding quite reasonably to an unreasonable situation?

Education raises similar issues.

Paulo Freire attacked what he called the “banking” model of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into students who receive it (Freire, 1970/2018). His alternative treated education as a process through which people learn to examine their world and recognise that what appears inevitable may have been socially constructed.

That idea sits close to my own view of teaching.

A university class should not simply make students better informed. It should make them harder to fool.

That does not mean teaching students what political views to hold. Quite the reverse. Critical education should equip people to inspect claims, notice assumptions, recognise power and challenge the terms in which questions have been posed. The aim is greater intellectual autonomy.

This is one reason I have become interested in the recent debate about critical thinking, solitude and individual agency. Collective action matters, but thought also requires some independence from the group. Hannah Arendt placed considerable weight on the relationship between thinking, judgement and political life. For Arendt, one danger of mass society lies in the surrender of judgement rather than mere social isolation (Arendt, 1958).

Critical Theory therefore interests me not because it supplies a political doctrine, but because it unsettles certainty.

It asks us to examine what has come to seem normal.

Who defined the problem?

Who benefits from this account?

Whose experience is absent?

What assumptions have slipped into the language?

What forms of power operate here?

What other explanation might fit the evidence?

These are useful questions in almost every area in which I work.

They apply when a photographer constructs an image of a stranger. They apply when a psychologist defines a behaviour as abnormal. They apply when a coach encourages adaptation. They apply when a university decides what counts as valid knowledge. They apply when news media decide which pictures represent a war, protest or community.

They also apply to artificial intelligence, perhaps with greater force than ever.

AI systems draw from vast bodies of human culture. They therefore inherit patterns of classification, value and exclusion that already exist within that culture. The important question is not simply whether AI produces correct answers. We also need to ask how its categories were formed, which sources become authoritative, whose knowledge becomes visible and what forms of knowledge disappear.

Critical Theory offers no simple answer to any of these questions. That is part of its value.

It is less a doctrine than a habit of intellectual suspicion: not cynicism, but a refusal to mistake familiarity for truth.

For photographers, teachers, psychologists and researchers, that habit matters because all four professions deal in acts of interpretation. We select, classify, explain and represent. Those acts always carry assumptions.

The task, then, is not merely to look more closely.

It is to learn to question the conditions that taught us how to look in the first place.

Over the next series of posts, I shall explore some of the thinkers who have helped develop that challenge, including Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Freire, Foucault, Hall and others. I am less interested in treating them as monuments of theory than in asking a more practical question: what might each of them help us notice that we would otherwise miss?

References

Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.

Benjamin, W. (2008). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. In M. W. Jennings, B. Doherty, & T. Y. Levin (Eds.), The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media. Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1936)

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1970)

Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage.

Horkheimer, M. (1972). Traditional and critical theory. In Critical theory: Selected essays. Herder and Herder. (Original work published 1937)