Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography's ability to "touch" us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography's role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee's Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes' family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", and logs on to online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, "Touching Photographs" is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.

"Touching Photographs is a series of memorably profound excursions into the defining techniques of modernity. A wonderful, beautifully written book." (Christopher Pinney, University College, London)"

Margaret Olin is a senior research scholar in the Divinity School with joint appointments in the Departments of History of Art and Religious Studies and in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University.