Product Review

This expanded edition of Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm's first book, presents new essays that explore the last work of Diane Arbus, Sally Mann's family pictures, E. J. Bellocq's famous 1912 nudes, Andrew Bush's richly detailed interiors, and the relationship between painting and photography. The text of the original edition - long a much sought after rarity - is reprinted here in full, including essays on the works of the masters Stieglitz, Steichen, and Weston, as well as contemporaries such as Robert Frank, Irving Penn, and William Eggleston. Malcolm offers a view of photography that is as complicated and as controversial as the medium itself. Her writings on such topics as Richard Avedon's portraits, Garry Winogrand's street photographs, and Harry Callahan's color work exhibit the elegant prose style and incisive commentary for which she is renowned. Illustrated with 100 black-and-white photographs, this is a book to read and to ponder, a sensitive and generous appraisal of where photography stands in relation to all the arts, and to its own past, by one of the leading writers of her generation.