In life after postmodernism, photography, cinema, television and the internet have all changed the way we think about pictures.Addressing this new visual landscape, David Bate, acclaimed writer and thinker in photography and culture, introduces a new approach to the analysis of photographs and their location in the world He shows how photographs circulate in an 'image-world' that exists beyond art and media origins and has affected our sense of time and its relationship to memory. He argues that these images permeate our minds as much as does the environment. Re-thinking the arguments of Roland Barthes' ‘Camera Lucida’ and usingcontemporary and historical visual examples, ranging from Stieglitz, to Jeff Wall, to anonymous machine pictures, Bate demonstrates the complex ways in which photographic images resonate across public and private spaces, and that they also carry a slippage of meaning that is never quite fixed, yet always contingent and social.These innovative readings of photographs are breathtaking in their breadth and depth and will appeal to a wide audience interested in visual culture as much as to specialists in photography. This book is also essential reading for students of photography.