Approaching photography
A book exclusively about the ideas behind photographs, rather than the techniques, had not been published in Britain for photography students until Paul Hill wrote Approaching Photography in 1982. He has now updated it, and here he describes its genesis, and how the new third edition reflects the enormous changes in photography during the past 40 years whilst acknowledging how so much is still the same...
The book emerged from a meeting of photography lecturers convened in London around 1980 by Focal Press, then the largest publisher of photographic books in Europe. Focal Press had many publications on the applications and techniques of lens-based media, but nothing on ‘teaching photography as art’, they said. I had recently been leader of the Creative Photography course run at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham and Derbyshire College of Higher Education where we championed the artistic, rather than the
