Offers a comprehensive survey of a rich and important period of photographic history, from the 1960s to the 21st century. Arranged thematically, this book presents works by some of the most significant international artists who have explored and extended the boundaries of photography.

Only recently have the majority of art museums begun acquiring works of photography. In 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art, New York - one of the first institutions to collect photographs - staged a retrospective of the American colour photographer William Eggleston, this was a groundbreaking event: it was the first time colour photography had been exhibited, as art, in a major museum. This moment in the 1970s marked a dramatic sea change, but the tides had begun to turn in the early 1960s, when artists such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter used the everyday, mass-produced quality of the snapshot as a basis for their work. From this early adoption of photography for its "artless" qualities, artists have explored photography extensively ever since, ranging from Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman's reflections on the visual messages of film and advertising, to the richly layered, 'painterly' genres of portraiture, landscape and still life in the work of Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Roni Horn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall and others who have brought photography full circle, to the roles that painting fulfilled in past centuries.

Survey - David Campany: authoritative, 20,000 word essay by an expert in the field, explaining and contextualising the place of photography in late twentieth-century art. - Works - Eight sections, thematically arranged and chronologically ordered within each section, showing the most significant examples of the diverse ways artists have used and addressed photography - Documents - Comprehensive anthology of essential theoretical texts, original artists' statements and interviews. - Artists' Biographies, Authors' Biographies, Bibliography and Index