Manufacturing Meaning: Discourse, Power, and Cultural Politics in Realist Photography

By examining the interplay of photographs, photobooks, and contemporary Taiwanese society, this book analyzes the production of meaning in realist photography.

If the decisive moment of an image is never the decisive moment of reality, does the meaning of a photograph transcend the meaning of reality? Who creates meaning? And how is it created?

As you pick up this book, images are being produced in overwhelming quantities. With meticulous reasoning and candid critical power, Kuo Li-hsin challenges the classical totems of "documentary photography" in Taiwan since the 1980s, deconstructing the power dynamics within images and how our photography constructs our world.