My first book, Gargantua (Verso 1996) was about aspects of visual mass and popular culture, including street art, amateur photography and computer games. High Art Lite (Verso 1999) remains the only serious critical and analytical account of ‘young British art’, and was the subject of much controversy. With the Royal Academy, I wrote Paris Pictured (2002), an account of the rise and fall of street photography in the city, and the conditions for its flourishing in leftist politics, rent control and regulated development. Internet Art (Tate 2003) was the first book about the subject, and examined the deep challenges it presented to the art world and to conventional critical discourse. Art Incorporated (later published and updated as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction) (Oxford, 2004/ 2006, updated edition 2020) analysed the globalisation of the art world, and art’s place in contemporary culture and society. It has been translated into six languages. In 2020, my major book about war and photography appeared, entitled Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman and Littlefield). This book analysed the confluences of military and photographic technology, military strategy, the history of the media, and the different regimes under which killing could be put on show for propaganda and strategic purposes.

In 2008 I curated the Brighton Photo Biennial, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, nine contrasting exhibitions about war photography. Materials from the exhibitions, and essays on the subject and interviews with photographers were later collected into the book, Memory of Fire (Photoworks 2013). I have also curated Failing Leviathan: Magnum and Civil War, at the National Civil War Centre, Newark in 2015; and The Spectre of the People, the main exhibition for the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale, 2023-24: it was about populism as seen through lens-based imagery.

I have also written many shorter essays and art criticism for publications, including Artforum, Texte zur Kunste, Bazaar Art and the London Review of Books.

This site archives much of my writing, my photographic work–artistic and documentary, including records of art exhibitions.

There is also material about my curated exhibitions, and links to the work I have done for TV.

And finally the site includes my long-term photography/ memory project, The Anatomy of Photography.