If photography were in fact the primary subject of [On Photography], one would be obliged to take exception to the many omissions and odd emphases to be found in it. Susan Sontag says everything worth saying about Diane Arbus's grotesquerie, almost nothing about Ansel Adams's photographs (though she does sneer at some of his prose), and nothing valuable about Dorothea Lange; she finds Richard Avedon interesting but does not mention Wright Morris (who in God's Country and My People combines words and photographs better than anyone else has ever done)…. Moreover, if this book were really about photography one would look closely at some of the outrageous assertions she flashes about, in the manner of French intellectuals: "the way photography inexorably beautifies". Does it indeed? "Cameras are … a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete." A very jazzy notion. But since photography is secondary...