The most radical statements about photography come from photographers themselves. The twentieth-century avant-gardes were accompanied by publishing thunderclaps: programmatic books, magazines and radio broadcasts that called for perceiving the world anew through the medium and for changing it. The struggle over the tasks and the “right” use of photography, and over an aesthetic of its own, can be traced back to William Henry Fox Talbot and other pioneers; today it continues in photo blogs and internet platforms. The book is a discursive ramble through the history of photography: the focus is not on pictures but on the programmatic texts in which artists argue for their conception of the medium, shown in their original typography with translations into English and German.