This book offers a broad sampling of historical and contemporary issues affecting photography, whose aesthetics are often discussed as vigorously as politics and religion. The author is well informed and highly literate. The result is an important contribution to the discourse about photography.

Solomon-Godeau examines the picture inside the frame, the frame itself, and the larger context of both, by merging a feminist metacritique with an empirical, aesthetic approach to photographic images.

Fascinating, eloquent. Of special interest to anyone involved in the academic study of photography.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau has a wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated feminist approach to the visual arts—in her case, focusing exclusively on photography as a historical and contemporary practice and a social apparatus for producing and reinforcing or deconstructing categories of sexual differences. Solomon-Godeau offers this new book of her collected essays, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices—a beautifully designed and elegant book with high-quality black and white reproductions—as ‘a chronicle of photographic discourse of the 1980s.’ Solomon-Godeau's claim is not inflated, for not only has she been influential in the post-1970 establishment of a critical discourse of photography history, but in the essays reprinted here she covers ground from nineteenth-century calotypes to postmodern photographic practices. In this way, the book does cover the two major arms of the critical discourse in photography that developed in the 1980s—essays rereading historical practices and histories of photography from a feminist and/or Marxian perspective; and essays examining and paralleling developments in contemporary photographic practices—particularly those appropriative practices now seen as typical of postmodernism in the visual arts. Generally, Solomon-Godeau's approach is characterized by an impressively integrated weaving of psychoanalytic, Marxian, and specifically feminist theories, which she employs in examining the construction or deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity and particularly sexual identities in various photographic practices.

Employing postmodern and feminist critiques of representation as key reference points, Solomon-Godeau raises crucial questions about the complicity of photography in the reproduction of oppressive historical formations as well as considering the possibilities of photographic practice intervening to disrupt this reproduction. Within this agenda, Solomon-Godeau articulates an incisive, passionate, critical stance from which she addresses the professional community whose identities and commitments are formed within a concern for the practice and study of photography.