Research Guides: Art and Design: Photography

Photography

Encyclopedias and Reference

The following links will take you to encyclopedias and reference manuals to help you get started on your project. Here you can find general background information, definitions, and history on photography. Searching in an encyclopedia can also help you find a topic for a project or paper.

Online

100 Ideas that Changed Photography
This compelling book chronicles the most influential ideas that have shaped photography from the invention of the daguerreotype in the early 19th century up to the digital revolution and beyond.

Grove Art Online/Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Premier online art reference sources searchable in one place: Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Other features include: "images only" search; timelines of art; resources for educators; subject guides on visual art topics, and Benezit Dictionary of Artists search (we have the print set). Note: Access is limited to 3 simultaneous users. If you can't gain access, try again later.

Print

Grove Art Guide to Photography by Tanya Sheehan (Editor)
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR15 .G76 2016
A field guide for students, instructors, and scholars, the Grove Art Guide to Photography provides a thorough overview of photography's history, from the early 19th century to the present. This wide-ranging volume examines photographic practices around the world and highlights key movements and concepts that define the field. It includes 28 geographical and topical surveys, covering areas such as documentary photography, street photography, vernacular photography, and fashion photography, each with carefully selected bibliographies. 75 additional biographies and a glossary of photographic processes and techniques round out this fully illustrated, essential introduction to the study of photography.
The Glossary of Digital Photography by John G. Blair
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR267.B55 2008
With the many technical, complex, and interwoven words, and new words being created daily, even veteran photographers have trouble keeping up with the lingo of digital photography. The solution comes to us in The Glossary of Digital Photography, which is the most comprehensive publication of its kind to date. With over 1500 words, abbreviations, and acronyms, the Glossary strives to help those involved in this cutting-edge industry to understand the language that makes it up. The Glossary has been extensively researched to collect the terms currently in use and to provide the most up-to-date meanings of these terms.
Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms by Gordon Baldwin
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR9.B35 1991
Explains and illustrates photographic terms. The book sets out and defines the vocabulary of photography from its earliest processes through to the age of the analogue camera.
The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography by Michael R. Peres (Editor)
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR9.F6 2007
The role and value of the picture cannot be matched for accuracy or impact. This comprehensive treatise, featuring the history and historical processes of photography, contemporary applications, and the new and evolving digital technologies, will provide the most accurate technical synopsis of the current, as well as early worlds of photography ever compiled. This Encyclopedia, produced by a team of world renown practicing experts, shares in highly detailed descriptions, the core concepts and facts relative to anything photographic.

Finding Articles

Use databases to find academic articles to continue your research. Below are the most helpful databases for finding relevant articles for photography.

Note: If you are looking for collections or databases of images, take a look at the Finding Images guide (follow hyperlink or find the green tab to the left). This will take you to the Images guide. Once on the guide, click the "Image Databases" tab. The first box you will see, "Art Images Databases" contains links to collections of various high-quality/high-definition images from museums and galleries around the world.

Art and Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
Covers a broad range of subjects in: fine, decorative and commercial art, design, as well as architecture. Access over 600 full-text journals and 220 full-text books; includes over 63,000 images.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
An archive of important scholarly journals, eBooks and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Offers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as originally published.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Includes 400 scholarly journals in humanities, social sciences, and mathematics and over 50,000 ebooks primarily from university presses.

Photography Journals

The following are links to specific academic journals which are published and peer-reviewed by experts in the field. If you want to narrow your search to a specific style or focus, you might need to explore a couple of different journals to find what you are looking for.

History of Photography
History of Photography is an international quarterly journal devoted to the history, practice and theory of photography. It intends to address all aspects of the medium, treating the processes, circulation, functions, and reception of photography in all forms, including documentary, vernacular, popular and polemical work as well as fine art photography. The goal of the journal is to be inclusive and interdisciplinary in nature, welcoming all scholarly approaches, whether archival, historical, art historical, anthropological, sociological or theoretical. It embraces global photographical history, ranging across all geographical and cultural contexts around the world.
Contact Sheet (Print)
Contact Sheet is one of the longest-running art photography publications in the world that has showcased contemporary photographers since 1977. It features artists who have participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence and exhibition programs. Subscribers have access to the full digital archive of our publications. Can be found on the Floor 1 Journals, TR640.C66

Search the entire library catalog here.

Materials on photography topics are found under the "TR" subclass on the 3rd floor of the library.

TR1-1050	Photography
TR250-265	Cameras
TR287-500	Photographic processing. Darkroom technique
TR504-508	Transparencies. Diapositives
TR510-545	Color photography
TR550-581	Studio and laboratory
TR590-620	Lighting
TR624-835	Applied photography
TR925-1050	Photomechanical processes

Featured Books

Looking for inspiration for an interesting project? Currently, the featured books section holds a few of the most recent works on photography, including artist collections.

Performing to the Camera by Baker Simon
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N72.P5 P47 2016
Performing for the camera' examines how the photograph has both documented and developed our understanding of performance since the invention of the photographic medium. It engages with both the serious business of art and performance and the humour and improvisation of posing for the camera. Featuring many of the most compelling and experimental photographers in history, it explores the works by artists such as Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Nadar, Merce Cunningham, Charles Ray, Boris Mikhailov, Samuel Fosso, Cindy Sherman, Keith Arnatt and Masahisa Fukase. Edited by curator Simon Baker, this book provides fresh insight into the inter-relationship between performance and photography. With over 300 illustrations, this is the definitive publication on two of the most popular and intriguing art forms of our time.
Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography by William Chiego
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR645.S2582 M36 2016
Telling Tales' presents a survey of work by artists who record stories through pictures, whether real or imagined. Sixteen groundbreaking photographers are featured, including such greats as Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, Jessica Todd Harper, Erwin Olaf and others, with photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present. While some contemporary artists explore photographic imagery as it is mediated by technology, these artists exploit photography's ability to present a momentary, frozen narrative. Images are staged for the camera or highly manipulated through digital processes, yet they often resemble a casual snapshot or movie still. Primarily in color and often large-scale, the photographs reference everything from classical painting and avant-garde cinema to science fiction illustration and Alfred Hitchcock.
Animals in Photographs by Arpád Kovács; J. Paul Getty Museum Staff (Contribution by)
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR727.K68 2015
Spanning the history of photography through 80 images drawn from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Animals in Photographs traces the relationship between animal representation and changes in camera and film technology from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
American Photography
Call Number: CFL Floor 4 Special Collections - Oversize TR23.A53
For more than two decades, this annual review of the best of the year's photography has not only provided the most arresting, moving and technically original images seen through a viewfinder but it has also been a valuable visual document of its time. Chosen by a jury of experienced design and editing professionals from book publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, and art, the winners' photographs, some 300 of them in almost 400 pages, are displayed in their best light in an elegantly designed hardcover volume. Ranging from events that shook the world to the captured moments that normally pass unnoticed to staged shots that prove the art involves more than just opening the shutter, the photographs show the infinite power of the medium to grab our attention and hold our gaze in an age of perpetual motion. From 1985-present.
Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject by Jordan Bear
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks TR148.B43 2015
Examines how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. Integrates images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework by locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception.