This book explores the multiple roles of photography as viewed through perhaps the single most important collection of American photography of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s -- the permanent collection of The Museum of Contemporary Photography. Isolating the development of postwar photography into four major roles -- artistic expression, documentation, commercial industry, and scientific tool -- this book includes essays by renowned scholars, and features 170 images from such photographers as Diane Arbus, John Coplans, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Alfredo Jaar, Fazal Sheikh and many more. As an instructive primer on four decades of photography, as a work of extensive research and scholarship, or simply as an unprecedented assemblage of great photography, Photography's Multiple Roles is a monumental and accessible work.