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Any attempt to filter this cacophony of visual noise is more than welcome. Susan Bright, a well known face in London photo circles from her time at the National Portrait Gallery, has revised and updated her 2006 Art Photography Now (Thames & Hudson) survey of artists who might be described as taking the route conceptual.

Bright takes this opportunity to infiltrate a large percentage of women photographers into the review of eighty artists working with the medium. Some are as expected: Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Candida Höfer, but she introduces some evolving talents like Hannah Starkey, Laura Letinsky and Tina Barney. And there is a perceptible feminist undercurrent to this book, which in no way detracts from Susan Bright’s overall premise, which clearly buys in to the current fashion in image-making.

Throughout, Bright adopts the very effective template of a contextualising introduction followed by an ‘in-their-own-words’ artists’ commentary for each entry. The whole book is divided into seven disciplines within contemporary photography: Portrait, Landscape, Narrative, Object, Fashion, Document and the City. Bright offers an erudite introduction to the whole and forewords to each section, which go some way to elucidate a very elusive determination of the role of photography as a fine art.

What lets Art Photography Now down is the appalling design, a very rare occurrence at Thames & Hudson. Pretentious, oversize serif type and negative leading (an affectation seenin ID Magazine over 20 years ago) battle the images for attention on each page; and a poor column width/point size/leading design on Bright’s introduction and foreword texts only serve to irritate the reader. An unnecessary dissimulation to some very interesting photographs.