Concept and convention

Abstract There are, of course, many books on the history of photography, among them fundamental and profound works like those of Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, and Otto Stelzer. However, since 1931, when Walter Benjamin's Kleine Geschichte der Photographie was published, only a few books on the aesthetics of the photographic medium have appeared in print. Here is one of those, and one that provokes analysis and contradiction.