Criticizing Photographs

Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images by Terry Barrett is a standard college textbook on photographic criticism and theory. It equips beginning and advanced students with a framework of four critical activities, describing, interpreting, evaluating, and theorizing, for making sense of images.

Drawing on worked readings of individual photographs, the book addresses the nature of art criticism, the contexts in which photographs are made and viewed, and the perennial question of whether photography is art. First widely used from the 1990s and repeatedly revised, it remains a core text in photography education.