Forget Photography

This is the most engaging, illuminating and provocative book about the photographic condition I have read in a long time! Andrew Dewdney's passionate exhortation to forget photography comes from a deep political concern about the violence of the medium which is rooted in the belief that 'to capture' is 'to represent.' The book is also a celebration of the ongoing vitality of image-making with cameras and other machines—and an invitation to renew our understanding of images as being part of data flows and clouds.

Joanna Zylinska, author of Nonhuman Photography and Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice at King's College London

Despite its numerous technical deaths, photography refuses to die. In confronting this paradox, Forget Photography throws a welcome grenade at its ossifying institutions—from the museum to the academy—which continue to sustain photography's afterlife. Crucial to the book's brilliance is the central call to 'forget photography' which is mobilised variously as a manifesto, break-up letter, and a political project. In slaying the zombie of photography, Dewdney asks us to make space for new understandings of the image under computational capitalism. An ambitious, important and necessary book.

Katrina Sluis, Associate Professor and Head of Photography & Media Arts, School of Art & Design, Australian National University

Smart and political, Forget Photography offers an excellent insight into the transformation of visual culture. It tracks many of the influential questions so far, some of the emerging answers, and articulates the impactful implications of the networked image.

Jussi Parikka, FAMU (Prague) and Winchester School of Art

Photography's powerful hold on our thinking and culture has tended to blind us to the reality of the digital present. It is on this basis, Andrew Dewdney's lively, original and engaging polemic makes the claim, that we should forget photography. Freeing us from photography, he offers a useful road map for a better understanding of the computational systems now shaping visuality.

Mark Durden, Professor of Photography, University of South Wales, Cardiff