Goodreads asked Tom Ang:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Tom Ang It takes no genius to come up with the idea of writing a history of photography (My 'Photography - the definitive visual history'. (By the way, the word 'definitive' is sales-department speak; it's not a word I would ever wish to burden any of my writing or thinking with.) While the world is not short of histories of photography, it does not need another book that trots out the same culprits while ignoring contributions from technology, from parts of the world that are not Europe and North America. And I wanted to offer a book that was sound on the cameras, lenses and processes that are often passed over by art historians whose knowledge do not extend to bits of metal and glass. (See, for example, a respected art historian refer to the Leica range-finder as the first SLR camera.)

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