Malcolm, Janet - Robert Coles (review date spring 1998)

Robert Coles (review date spring 1998)

SOURCE: Coles, Robert. Review of Diana & Nikon, by Janet Malcolm. Wilson Quarterly 22, no. 2 (spring 1998): 106.

[In the following review, Coles alleges that in Diana & Nikon Malcolm attempts to emphasize the vagueness of photography, both in terms of artistic intent and interpretation.]

The adage has it that a picture is worth a thousand words, but [in Diana & Nikon] the essayist Janet Malcolm manages deftly to reverse that assertion—indeed, to make the reader in some instances quite wary of a given photographer's intentions and work. For many years in the pages of the New Yorker, Malcolm has displayed a talent for getting to the bare bones of the matter, and, not rarely, a brusque impatience with the received pieties that go unexamined. In a sense, photography itself has become one of those pieties, its supposed “truths” an easy bromide, gladly accepted as...

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