Janet Malcolm is the photography critic for the New Yorker, and her column has long been admired for its perception, lucidity and utter lack of cant. Her essays—collected here for the first time and complete with reproductions of the works under discussion—explore the place of photography in the continuum of art. Her discussions of the works of pioneers Stieglitz, Steichen and Weston, inno-vators Avedon, Eggleston and Sonneman, and other major representatives of this new and vital art lead the reader to surprising and often unortho-dox conclusions. Malcolm's central concern is how photography can be defined. What is its place in the hierarchy 1 and the history of the arts? If Malcolm's answer is equivocal, it is because her view of photography is as complicated and controversial as the subject itself. Nonetheless, what she believes—whether about the portraits of Avedon, the snapshots of Winogrand, the nudes of Weston or the abstracts of Callahan— is emphatically clear and personal. This is a book to read and to ponder, a sensitive and generous appraisal of where photography is now in relation to all the arts as well as to its own past.
