A. D. Coleman started writing regularly on photography in 1967 for the Village Voice, at a time when very few critics took the medium seriously. His work, according to Joel Eisinger, qualified him as perhaps "the first postmodernist critic" in the field. After his tenure at the Voice, Coleman became the first photography critic at The New York Times, and has since published in numerous publications internationally on mass media, communication technologies, art, and photography. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Getty Museum Guest Scholar, and has received awards from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie and the Center for Creative Photography, among other recognitions of his important critical work.