It is hard to imagine daily life without photography: from advertising to illustrated magazines, from artistic production to the dissemination of images online or on smartphones, it is such a pervasive medium that it would be impossible to grasp it as a unitary phenomenon. Photographic images are so pervasive that we almost no longer see them for what they are and want to be; at the same time their expressive force pushes us to believe they are transparent access to the real, when instead they are always a mediation, a shifting interpretation, obedient to a precise language and to specific rhetorical devices. From the double perspective of the key concepts of “theory” and “history”, applied to the general study of photography, David Bate traces the broad territory in which it moves back to its fundamental genres, critically analysing them. This new, extensively revised edition contains two new chapters devoted to the different forms embodied by photography within today’s “visual culture”, and draws on a very wide selection of explanatory images.