Reddit reviews A World History of Photography

Some books to start with:

A World History of Photography by Naomi Rosenblum is a good history of photography including important artists and some basic insight to why they are important. It covers the names that you need to know if you're going to talk to someone and say "Well that photographer seems to be influenced by Walker Evans." It also gives some basic background on different mediums and processes and the general trends of the times.

On Photography by Susan Sontag is the first step into serious thought of photograph as an art. There are no pictures, it's a collection of essays about why people photograph. She will make reference to people and their photographs, but it's more about the thought and ideas.

As you go on there are tons of great books by individual photographers or books/catalogues of important exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art's "Family of Man" was a huge, groundbreaking, exhibition for photography at the MoMA put together by Edward Steichen (one of those important photographers you'd learn about in Rosenblum's book) that pulled together work from tons of photographers around the world in the 1955. While a bit dated, the catalogue from it is worth checking out if you ever come across it.

There's a lot more contemporary work that is certainly worth checking out but I tend to push people more in the direction of where their interest is... starting with the basics of the history of photography (Rosenblum), understanding the concepts of why we photograph (Sontag), and seeing what can be achieved (Steichen) is a good foundation to move forward from. It's my opinion that these are 3 books that probably should be on the shelves of any photographer that likes to call what they do art.

That does sound really interesting. I'll look into finding some essays on that subject. I did take a history of photography class in undergrad, but we our only assigned readings were from A World History of Photography Thank you for the suggestion!

https://www.amazon.ca/World-History-Photography-Naomi-Rosenblum/dp/0789209373/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

We use this book in our program, seems like it would useful for this purpose..!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0789209373/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_6sgeAbTMP177J