Comprehensive, exhaustive and richly illustrated, the volume touches on different fields: art, fashion, advertising, documentary and private photography. Across eight thematic chapters, the author considers more than 150 years of the history of photography, from the daguerreotype to the digital age: from the nineteenth-century pioneers Hippolyte Bayard and Julia Margaret Cameron to the twentieth-century masters Edward Weston, Lee Miller and Richard Avedon, to contemporary innovators such as Newsha Tavakolian, tracing an original history of the photographic portrait.