Elizabeth Edwards is Professor of Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester. From 1988 until 2005, she was Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, where she was also a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology.

This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The book's contributions are drawn from disciplines including the history of photography, visual anthropology and art history, with case studies from a range of countries such as the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images.