Making it Up: Staged Photography (Photo Library)

A revealing and timely book, Making It Up is an illustrated history of staged photography.

Presenting work from the earliest to the most contemporary photographers, Making It Up challenges the idea that the camera never lies. With approximately one hundred photographs supported by extended commentaries, the book illustrates that, though we often recognize the staged, constructed, or the tableau as a feature of contemporary photography, this way of working is almost as old as the practice itself.

Remarkable in themselves, these photographic fictions, whether created by early practitioners such as Lewis Carroll or Roger Fenton, internationally renowned artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, or contemporary figures such as Hannah Starkey and Bridget Smith, find new, intriguing relevance in our Photoshopped and so-called post-truth age.

100 color photographs

Marta Weiss is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is an expert on nineteenth-century photography and has published widely on the subject.