******
- Verified Buyer
This book should really be titled "Why Walker Evans Matters" as Thompson spends such a significant portion defending his former employer (even the dust jacket reminds us Thompson worked as Evans's principal assistant for a short spell). Thompson decries the aphoristic, footnote-less, modernist style of all earlier writings on photography, saving his most pointed criticisms for Susan Sontag. Thompson mentions how Sontag's own critical hang-ups with Evans appeared while the late photographer was still living, yet Thompson, in a cruel irony, hasn't reserved this same methodology for Sontag's words. In the latter sections of the work, Thompson trudges forth as Evans' mandated apologist, completely avoiding addressing Sontag's most intriguing complaints of Evans (and others) that she pushes in both On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, that is, the major issues of the uncaptioned portrait, images that deny subject identity (such as in Evans's Subway Portraits). Indeed, one could argue Thompson's book is intended to merely advance the conversation, extend the dialogue even further and that such reactionary commentary would detract from the overall goal. The problem with this defense, however, is that Thompson already attacks Sontag for her brand of sweeping rhetoric, a picking-and-choosing of her acerbic discourse, and in the end has engaged in such sour behaviors himself. Certainly questioning Sontag's long-canonization is needed and fruitful, Thompson just chooses to do so in a very unsatisfactory and embarrassingly incomplete manner. In other parts of the scant work, Thompson offers a few readings of Atget, Winograd, and Marcia Due which are all extremely pedestrian (the foregrounding trees here mean this, this distant subject's clothing may say that) and focus so painfully on simple, formalistic elements. In exerting a half-baked notion on "truth" on these texts, Thompson extends his great disservice. Thompson purports his work of that of a philosopher yet he avoids employing any ample, amplified "rigorous thinking," as Heidegger would say (a thinker that Thompson relegates to a single footnote of a minor Heidegger work, completely avoiding his more significant essays on art, or Being). Again, seemingly in a defense against Evans, Thompson's hypocritically sweeping gesture casts off discussions of the ethics of exploitation in photography (perhaps the only reference to Sontag, and other's, valid critiques), as if such conversations are stale and outmoded. However, if he's seeking a sort of ontological truth, it would have behooved Thompson to engender more thinking here, not just with the thoughts of Heidegger, but those too of Levinas and Irigaray, powerful thinkers that advance important thoughts on ethical relationships to the Other and how engaging in such vigor leads to an authenticity of being. The closest Thompson gets here is in his (too brief) look at a single Winograd image, offering some undercooked ideas regarding dialectics between subject and operator, but Thompson fails here, as in many places throughout the book, to follow these thinking-threads deeper along their paths to disclosure. It would be unfair to call Thompson's book mean-spirited, of course, but the brevity-as-profundity technique is just a masked laziness, and this makes it practically just as offensive.
