This book examines the politics - both implicit and explicit - informing photographic criticism, history and practice. As a revisionist approach to the medium's history, an analysis of photographic modernism and the institutions promoting it, and a feminist exploration of the camera's role in producing (and reproducing) social and sexual ideology, the volume addresses its subject from a variety of perspectives. Since an important aspect of photographic politics is sexual politics, (both in the sense of women's historic professional exclusion from photographic practice, and in the sense of their status as objects rather than subjects of the camera's gaze), the author features the work of a feminist photographer and her attempt to reckon with the sexual politics that photography normally maintains. This, in turn, provides the bridge which takes up certain themes in both a historic repressed context to illuminate questions in light of contemporary practice.