Book excerpt: "Acting the Part is the first major history of staged photography. Analysing many key works, from Hippolyte Bayard's 1840 self-depiction as a suicide by drowning to Man Ray's 1923 portrait of Marcel Duchamp posing as his alter ego, Rrose Selavy, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s, and Yinka Shonibare's 1998 Diary of a Victorian Dandy, it traces the genre from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to the present day." "Illustrated throughout with works ranging from the earliest salted paper prints and daguerreotypes to today's digitally manipulated images, Acting the Part is an authoritative survey of this enduring and highly creative branch of photography. It makes an argument for the importance of the staged photograph within the history of the medium and demonstrates its intrinsic artistic value."--BOOK JACKET.