First published in 2003 after twenty years of writing, Alexander Lapin's Photography As... quickly became a bestseller. The book examines the relationship between documentary and art photography, the construction of a visual language, and offers a classification of reportage approaches together with principles for evaluating and analysing photographic work, paying particular attention to composition and to the psychology of visual perception, including the eye's movement across a flat image. Treating the composition of a frame as a web of subtle connections between apparently independent elements, Lapin invites the reader to see the frame from the other side, in the three-dimensional space implied not by the subject of the photograph but by its formal elements, so that notions such as nearer-further or bigger-smaller take on new meaning; diagrams, line drawings and work by well-known photographers illustrate the argument, with part of the book given over to practical analysis of selected images. Unconnected to any particular camera technology, the book has remained in demand for decades among journalists, psychologists, art historians, designers, photo editors and anyone who loves the art of photography.