"Painting Photography Painting" is the essential first collection of essays by critic and theorist Carol Armstrong. It brings together writings encompassing the many inflection points of her academic work, including French painting, early photography, feminist theory, and the representation of women and gender in the visual arts.

In the book’s titular essay, Armstrong asks of Ellen Gallagher’s 2008 painting "An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity," which depicts a barely visible sea creature created out of ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and variously sliced paper, ‘in what sense is this a painting exactly?’ This enquiry into the very essence of the medium provides a thread that runs throughout the book’s wide-ranging essays and ties together a variety of works ‘inscribed, drawn, printed, photographed, and variously pierced and punctured.’

Considering the very essences of these various works on paper, "Painting Photography Painting" provides a compelling path through Armstrong’s decades of writing. It weaves together figures from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Cézanne, Ellen Gallagher, Georges Seurat, Julia Margaret Cameron, Tina Modotti, and Diane Arbus in a single, illuminating volume.