This is perhaps one of the more interesting of the half-dozen or so introductory photography books I’ve read as part of my formal photography education. It’s neither a historical narrative, nor a practitioner's rumination on the craft or art of making images, but a review of some of the critical concepts used in discussing photographic images, of what they mean and how they are used. Bate does this through the prism of genres, specifically Documentary, Portraiture, Landscape, Still Life and Fine Art. There are also brief reviews of history and theory, as well as a concluding chapter on global trends.
The writing is largely accessible, especially in comparison to others who take a similar approach, such as Graham Clarke’s The Photograph, but may assume a bit much from a beginner. There were enough interesting observations scattered throughout to keep me engaged, such as peripateia, a theory of historical painting in which the artist seeks to depict the dramatic moment when past became future, which Bate positions as antecedent to Bresson’s decisive moment. I also appreciated his treatment of Still Life, often discussed in photography texts only in passing, which Bate frames contemporaneously as product photography, the kind of images you see in catalogs or on websites of e-merchants. Bate occasionally gets carried away, as in his discussion of product imagery, in which "images of hamburgers are depicted with beautifully lit sesame seeds on the top of the buns, which compensate for or complement the insular singularity of the object with the sign of a multiplicity."
It seems somewhat odd that a search for published reviews of this text came up empty.
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