They were part of a 1967 show called "New Documents," a crucial exhibit because it marked the end of traditional documentary photography and introduced a new approach to picture making, a self-conscious collaborative one in which both subject and photographer reveal themselves to the camera and to each other. The result is a directness that pulls the viewer smack into the life of the image. (pp. x-xi)

What Faurer did, and then Robert Frank, was to forget about elegance and experiment with exaggerated scale and light and shadow. This style ultimately became known as the "snapshot aesthetic," which hooked right onto the modernist sensibility. (p. 114)

And she had a special ability to seek out peculiar subject matter, and then her way of confronting it with her camera, well, it was like something I'd never seen before. She seemed to be able to suggest how it felt to be a...