The answer to the question, "What is photography?" is actually quite simple at first sight. Photography is a device to record light, invented in the 19th century, that allows us to fix the perspective perception of the world in the manner constructed since the Renaissance. Optics and chemistry go hand in hand to create a very effective means of perception. Despite the apparent simplicity of this first definition, there are few comparable cases in which a seemingly clearly and easily delimited field - here's the viewer, there's the world; here's the instrument, there's the image of the world - has created so much confusion.Urs Stahel In this accessible and eloquent book-length essay, Urs Stahel, writer, curator and co-founder of Fotomuseum Winterthur, muses on the very nature of photography. The introduction of the essay outlines the unique tension defining photography; it shows a segment of the world and simultaneously expresses a subjects particular view of the world. This tension is the source of its unique creative potential and its complex relation to truth. Stahel provides a philosophical perspective on these issues by placing them in an epistemological, social, and historical context. Chapters on industrial photography, staged and conceptual photography, and the current crisis of photojournalism provide a panoramic overview of the possibilities and challenges of photography in all of its variety, from the casual snapshot to art and commercial photography. Photography talks about pure, almost meaningless factuality; that something was there, that something happened. This is the nature of photography, the medium itself. Everything else is not the pure, almost automatic imprint of reality on film, but the result of the photographers or artists relation to the world. It corresponds to the context he moved in. The image is an expression of this relation, which is never neutral, never static, never complete, never democratic, never truth in any absolute sense. It much rather emerges from a dynamic, performative process, a larger spatial-temporal context, and from the construction of the world as an image world.Urs Stahel This profound and readable essay, one of the few works daring enough to address the nature of photography, is destined to become a standard work. A must read for anyone interested in thinking about photography.