Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period

This book is the first comprehensive overview of the criticism of photography as art. Author Joel Eisinger begins with Pictorialism and Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, moving on to the straight photography of Strand, Weston, and Adams. He discusses documentary and magazine photography of the 1930s and 1940s, offering an explanation for why these years seemed to be a low point for photographic art criticism. Later, he discusses writings of Minor White, Henry Holmes Smith, and others who revived the critical development of photography as art, ending with 1970s formalism. An informative and fascinating critical history.