Hi April,
I don't know what level you are aiming for. This could be s small thing like Nikki Freeman's essay
here or a major Graduate Student Essay for a serious grade!
The easiest thing I can do is provide a brief list of books as suggestions from a course by Beninger at USC some years ago:
PELFREY, Robert, with Mary Hall-Pelfrey. Art and Mass Media. New York: Harper and Row (1985), 348 pp.
BERGER, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books (1972), 166 pp.
McCLOUD, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisble Art. New York: Harper Perennial (1994), 216 pp.
SPIEGELMAN, Art. Maus I. New York: Pantheon (1986), 159 pp.
These should be in your library and you can start today with the following pages as the minimum. I take no credit for the choices!
1. BERGER: Ch. 3, pp. 45-64.
2. PELFREY: Ch. 5, pp. 119-142.
3. MITCHELL: Chs. 1 & 2, pp. 2-20
This should be an easy jump start.
Photography and lithography have made claims of realism and have pushed the boundries with imaginative transformations of colors shapes and become part of 3 dimensional creative work.
Think of examples of photography being used in partial or complete replacement of the model or the artist sitting in a chair for hours outdoors to paint a landscape.
Look at photography for exploring the nature of realism and fantasy. Truth and distortion.
Photography as the basis for Andy Warhals work and to the complex derivations of modern multimedia artists.
These books should give you a start.
Kind wishes,
Asher