Photography Changes Everything

Photography Changes Everything offers a provocative rethinking of photography's impact on our culture and our daily lives. Compiling hundreds of images and responses from leading authorities on photography, it offers a brilliant, reader-friendly exploration of the many ways in which photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. The volume draws on the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, science centers and archives to launch an unprecedented interdisciplinary dialogue on photography's capacity to shape and change our experience of the world. Photography Changes Everything features over 300 images and nearly 100 engaging short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures and others—from Hugh Hefner to John Baldessari, John Waters, Robert Adams, Sandra Phillips and many others. Each story responds to images selected by project contributors. Together they engage readers in a timely exploration of the extent to which our lives have been transformed through our interactions with photographic imagery. Edited by leading photography curator and author Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice and power of photography at this transitional moment in visual culture.

Curator and writer Marvin Heiferman has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history in projects such as Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989). A contributing editor to Art in America, he serves on the faculty of both the International Center of Photography/Bard College and the School of Visual Art’s MFA programs in photography. He was creative consultant to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2005 to 2011, during which time he conceptualized and curated click! photography changes everything (click.si.edu).

Art historian and author of numerous essays and articles on American art and photography, Merry A. Foresta, was the founding director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2000 to 2010. Prior to that, she was senior curator for photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her publications include Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (1998), Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (1992), Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (1995), and At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (2004).