Introduction - realism, contradiction and interpretation. Photography, the everyday and the Russian Revolution; technique, technology and the everyday - German photographic culture in the 1920s and 1930s; the making of documentary - documentary after factography; the state, the everyday and the archive; Surrealism, photography and the everyday; inside Modernism - American photography and post-war culture; John Berger and Jean Mohr - the return to communality; the rise of theory and the critique of realism - photography in Britain in the 1980s; disfiguring the ideal - the body, photography and the everyday; Jeff Wall - the social pathology of everyday life; Jo Spence - photography, empowerment and the everyday; digital imagery and the critique of realism.