From conceptual art's use of the banal and "artless" snapshots to the carefully constructed tableaux of Jeff Wall, this book considers the full range of ways that today's artists engage with photography to make art.

Some artists, such as Sophie Calle and Erwin Wurm, use photography as a record of a real performance or everyday action, while others such as Yinka Shonibare and Gregory Crewdson stage invented scenes and narratives to tell fictional stories. Andreas Kursky, Thomas Demand and Rineke Dijkstra present a cool, seemingly objective view of the external world, while Richard Billingham, Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tilmans offer up intimate details of their private lives. In the hands of Luc Delahaye and Allan Sekula, photography is a means of creating documentary, while for those such as Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, the photograph becomes a repository of personal, social and cultural values in an image-saturated world.

With some of the most important artists and key works, The Photograph as Contemporary Art is an ideal introduction to the twenty-first century's dominant art form.