This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form.

Introduction (Natalya Lusty and Donna West Brett) 1. Ontology or Metaphor? (Andrés Mario Zervigón) 2. Unsettling the Archive: The Stasi, Photography and Escape from the GDR (Donna West Brett) 3. Dark Archive: The Afterlife of Forensic Photographs (Katherine Biber) 4. Hard Looks: Faces, Bodies, Lives in Early Sydney Police Portrait Photography (Peter Doyle) 5. Anticipatory Photographs: Sarah Pickering and An-My Lê (Shawn Michelle Smith) 6. Eli Lotar's Para-urban Visions (Natalya Lusty) 7. The Presence of Video: Making the Displaced and Disappeared Self Visible (John Di Stefano) 8. Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi's Autobiography of Seeing(Jane Simon) 9. Suspending Productive Time: some photographs by Gabriel Orozco and Jacques Rancière's thinking of modern aesthetics. (Toni Ross) 10. Photography as Indexical Data: Hans Eijkelboom and Pattern Recognition Algorithms (Daniel Palmer) 11. Afterword: Photography Against Ontology (Blake Stimson)

Donna West Brett is a lecturer in art history at the University of Sydney.

Natalya Lusty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.