If you read the history of any new communication medium such as the cinema, television or radio, it always happens to be bound up with advances in some underlying technology. For example, cinema was born out of the rapid projection of a series of still images on a celluloid film strip. The difficulty of synchronizing sound recordings with the resulting moving images led to about 30 years of silent films - until such time as the technical problems were solved. In between the inventions, media seem to grow and develop at a slower pace, as content producers and consumers experiment with the most satisfactory and stimulating ways of communicating with each other. In the same example, silent film-makers eventually found ways of adding dialogue through scene titles and having music played during the projection of their films. This book is about the next chapter in the history of photography, which is emerging from a relatively stable period into a chaos of new inventions. Photography as we know it is at the same point as the silent films of 1926. The transition from analog to digital photography is spawning many new ways of taking, manipulating and sharing photographs. It is also bringing photography and videography closer together by unifying sound, still and moving images in the same digital medium.

A brief history of sound & image media.- Domestic photography & the role of sound.- Ambient photographs.- Musical photographs.- Talking photographs.- Conversational photographs.- Paper versus screen playback.- Conclusions.- References.