Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography

by Janet Malcolm

This expanded edition of Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm's first book, presents new essays that explore the last work of Diane Arbus, Sally Mann's family pictures, E. J. Bellocq's famous 1912 nudes, Andrew Bush's richly detailed interiors, and the relationship between painting and photography. The text of the original edition - long a much sought after rarity - is reprinted here in full, including essays on the works of the masters Stieglitz, Steichen, and Weston, as well as contemporaries such as Robert Frank, Irving Penn, and William Eggleston. Malcolm offers a view of photography that is as complicated and as controversial as the medium itself. Her writings on such topics as Richard Avedon's portraits, Garry Winogrand's street photographs, and Harry Callahan's color work exhibit the elegant prose style and incisive commentary for which she is renowned. Illustrated with 100 black-and-white photographs, this is a book to read and to ponder, a sensitive and generous appraisal of where photography stands in relation to all the arts, and to its own past, by one of the leading writers of her generation.

Genres: Photography, Essays, Art, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of In the Freud Archives and The Crime of Sheila McGough , as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.

The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.

Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .

Reviews

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a serious dearth of good writing on photography -- Peter Galassi's essays in various MoMA volumes probably take the crown, but there isn't much competition (Szarkowski, Sontag, et al. are mediocre at best). I've read most of Janet Malcolm's nonfiction and she is usually very good; unfortunately, these are some of her earliest, weakest essays for The New Yorker, and she has a strong amateur interest in photography but not an especially deep knowledge of it. Plenty of insights, however; I was happy to see that she agrees with me on the tragedy of the turn toward vernacular/snapshot photography in the late 1960s (and the attendant decline of formalism), and she's generally at her best when discussing photography's relationship to painting.

[yuefei · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a short introduction to photography in the US (and mostly New York), beginning with Stieglitz (going through Weston, Frank, Winogrand, Penn, Avedon and others) and ending with Chauncey Hare. Its brevity (and the fact that these were columns written for The New Yorker) doesn’t allow for much depth, not to mention the restrictions of the modernist discourse of the time and Malcolm’s US-centrism (Man Ray gets a passing mention), but it was worth reading for the sometimes illuminating ways in which she writes about photographs.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the best critical prose I have ever read. And so distinctly Malcolm in its clarity and passion. I finished almost every essay feeling that I would never see the photographer in question the same. Every essay could be taught. in a writing class or a photography. In particular the Sally Mann and Siane Arbus essays revealed aspects of their visions. I want to see like Malcolm, know every useful reference like her, and write like her. Sublime!

[ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

as always she writes very crisp funny mean sentences. That being said this book traces the development and calcification of her thoughts on photography and it’s much more interesting when she’s wrestling with what she might think than when she’s made up her mind

[Olga Vannucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Photography as art and not:
Real, too real, and the snapshot.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book I found by chance while scanning the photography section at my local library. It is a series of essays written between 1975 and 1979 by Janet Malcolm, a journalist and critic with The New Yorker. Although her understanding of the history and aesthetic importance of photography is broad, a certain evolution of thought is apparent over the short span of four years. This I think speaks to her open-mindedness. Too many artists and critics have taken immovable positions on the question of photography's importance as an art form.

What made me take it home was not her insightful and descriptive writing style. Neither was it the many reproductions of major works under discussion. It was, instead, the first paragraph of the first essay, which made me laugh quite audibly in an otherwise silent library. In it she quotes from Dorothy Norman's Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer:

"A woman of about fifty looks at a Marin exhibition in bewilderment. She turns to Stieglitz: 'Is there someone who can explain these pictures to me? I don't understand them at all. I want to know why they arouse no emotion in me.' Before Stieglitz realizes what he is saying, he replies, 'Can you tell me this: Why don't you give me an erection?' He walks back into his office. The woman acts as though she isn't quite sure she has heard him correctly." Neither is the reader of this passage when he comes to it near the end of Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, by Dorothy Norman, who for many years was Stieglitz's disciple, assistant, and self-appointed Boswell. Nothing that has come before in the long text has prepared him for it. The man who has all too insistently emerged from Miss Norman's worshipful illustrated biography is a person of such surpassing pomposity, sententiousness, emotional dullness, and Teutonic humorlessness that it is hard to credit him with a course mind, let alone being the most gifted and daring of American photographers and one of the most radical and influential forces in American modernism. But the photographs are there to confirm the artistic reputation, and so are the facts (though they are none too easy to extract from Miss Norman's over-detailed and undercritical text, and can be better pieced together from such sources as Roberty Doty's The Photo-Secession and Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography).

Her open criticism of other writers is refreshing. (I must admit I was also a little proud of her reference to Newhall as it is on my shelf.) Malcolm proved also to be a bountiful reference to other writings on photography as well as photography books by major figures. For example, she refers to Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait as "Stieglitz's posthumous masterpiece." And here that book sits at my library table waiting to be opened!

[Sarah left GR · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will admit right off the bat that the first few essasys were out of my depth -- despite being an enthusiastic amateur photographer, I don't have much of a background in the art history side of photography. (Nor do I have much of a background in art history at all, aside from a survey class in college, which was, shall we say, not recently.)

Malcom made references to photographers whose names I didn't recognize, and exhibitions that closed decades ago. Despite that disadvantage, I did get a lot out of this. Most importantly, a glimpse of the history of the critical dialogue surrounding photography-as-art.

And in an entirely unplanned turn of events, I found myself in New York just as I was finishing up this book... so to visit MoMA and actually *see* some of the artists she referenced (Steiglitz, Weston, Mondotti, Avedon, Arbus, etc.) was pretty darn awesome.

[Eric Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, I bought it new back in the 1980's and just never got around to reading it. These are essays from various magazines and they document the photography exhibitions in New York in the 1970's and various photographic concerns. Janet Malcolm says lots of silly things in this book, all in a serious tone, but it is still worth reading. Here's an example: "Art photography represents a more subtle collaboration - one between the photographer and the works of painting, drawing, or sculpture he has seen." So, we photographers get our ideas from those? From comic books perhaps, or movies, or perhaps other photographers. I don't know any photographer who would claim a sculptor as an influence. I recommend the book, but find it used if you can.

[dv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without the need of following a linear path, it constructs a peculiar history of XX century photography, talking about the photographers no less than about the photographs. Beautifully written.