Photomediations: A Reader

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media.

The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of data that produce photographic objects.

Photomediations: A Reader is part of a larger editorial and curatorial project called Photomediations: An Open Book, whose goal is to redesign a coffee-table book as an online experience. A version of this Reader also exists online in an open ‘living’ format, which means it can be altered, added to, mashed-up, re-versioned and customized. The Reader is published in collaboration with Europeana Space, and in association with Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney and Michael Wamposzyc.