Excellent history of photography. Organised by the French historian Michel Frizot, the book features in its almost 800 pages the contribution of many other authors. It is, in fact, a compilation of 41 independent essays depicting a panorama about the relation of image making and society transformations since the appearance of the first photographic processes. The interesting thing is exactly that texts do not address only the technical aspects of photographic processes and equipments, but rather links those to the history of culture and its relation with images.
It can be found at Amazon on the following link: A new history of photography