  We present a gauge invariant approach to photoproduction of mesons on
nucleons within a chiral unitary framework. The interaction kernel for
meson-baryon scattering is derived from the chiral effective Lagrangian and
iterated in a Bethe-Salpeter equation. Within the leading order approximation
to the interaction kernel, data on kaon photoproduction from SAPHIR, CLAS and
CBELSA/TAPS are analyzed in the threshold region. The importance of gauge
invariance and the precision of various approximations in the interaction
kernel utilized in earlier works are discussed.
