Writer Conversations

Writer Conversations offers a lively and engaging analysis of the practice of writing on photography. Composed as interviews with highly distinctive writers at the forefront of discourses and debates around visual culture, it provides sustained exploration into the processes and motivations that have given rise to an array of critical commentary and intellectual histories shaping the understanding, appreciation and study of photography today.

Formed of knowledge from culturally diverse worlds, viewpoints and approaches, the book brings together a range of voices from authors such as Tina M. Campt, David Campany and David Levi Strauss to Christopher Pinney, Joanna Zylinska, and Simon Njami. Drawing on relevant historical and contemporary examples, it grapples with bonds between looking and writing, seeing and “entering” images, qualities admired in other writers, professional demands and the frameworks of criticality. The writers also attend to inclusive and representative strategies, white supremacy and structures of inequality and complicity, autobiography and lived experience, synthesising social and environmental justice, and connecting readers to new emotional and critical perspectives beyond dominant and historically established narratives. Writer Conversations sets out models for imagining ways of writing on the currency and status of the photographic image amidst radical global transformations and a medium departing in new directions.

Featuring Taco Hidde Bakker, Daniel C. Blight, David Campany, Tina M. Campt, Taous R. Dahmani, Horacio Fernández, Max Houghton, Tanvi Mishra, Simon Njami, Christopher Pinney, Zoé Samudzi, Olga Smith, David Levi Strauss, Deborah Willis, Wu Hung, Joanna Zylinska.