Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography.

by Gretchen Garner The John Hopkins University Press/ 306pp./$34.95 (hb).

Very few histories of photography read like novels. Obviously as a photographer, a photo-historian, and a photo-educator, I stand as a very specific audience, one that by definition is going to be receptive and critical, one that belongs to the same circles as the author. Gretchen Garner's Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography is well-documented without overwhelming the reader with too many details, it is well-organized, challenging at times, and clever: in a few words a pleasurable experience in form and content in an area of literature that is not usually associated with such descriptions.

Writing a history of twentieth century American photography in 306 pages, in what is in "Histories" standard a small format book, having a text that breathes in spacious margins is unusual Starting with a first chapter (out of thirteen) titled "Photography of Witness" and associating Muybridge, Lartigue, Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Avedon, and Helen Levitt under the same label (the "spontaneous witnesses") sounded challenging at first if not a little too far-fetched But rapidly Garner establishes herself as someone who not only knows her subject but understands it; she moves with extreme ease in it and takes us for an interesting guided tour, one that does not pretend to be blandly objective but clearly defines her learned vision. The thirteen chapters. organized in two parts, encompass a period beginning in the 1920s and ending with the century. Part one, "Photography of Witness," starting with Edward Weston's famous Pepper # 30 (1930) and ending with Minor White's images in Aperture, has "Spirit in Photography" as its sixth and last chapter. As the reader may soon realize, Garner does not provide abundant illustrations for her text but strong "exemplars." Part two, "Disappearing Witness," the title of the book, researches the last forty years of photographic activity in the US in seven chapters (pp. 103-253) and proposes categories such as "Photography about Photography" (ch. 9), "The Subject Self" (ch. 11), or "Arrangement, Invention, and Appropriation" (ch. 12).

In order to better analyze the merits of this book, it must be said that Garner did not try her pen at writing a History of photography, in other words a history of world photography. Such a task is probably beyond the scope of a single writer, and pools of historians are hard to synchronize and articulate. The pressure of publishers and economic constraints are often too hard to handle and cripple the attempted scholarly work (why wouldn't society as a whole--public money that our taxes finance--sponsor such humanistic endeavors instead of embarking upon military fiascos tainted with destruction and death abroad?) Nowadays, given the vastness of the subject, world histories by a single author run the risk of falling short. Those who have embarked on such an adventure in this country have ended with somewhat American-centric sagas that only touched on stereotypical and partial approaches of photographic productions on other continents, being critically limited regarding contemporary production (for instance limiting German contemporary photography to the Bechers and their students, French photography to Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue and Doisneau, British photography to Bill Brandt and Jo Spence, not to speak of Italian, Spanish, Russian, African or Asian photographies). Obviously Garner avoided the pitfall; she is more at ease speaking about (or to) Jerry Uelsmann (whose image is on the cover of the book) than Joan Fontcuberta and we should thank her for acknowledging the limits of her study and not pretending it is broader. Her past experience as former editor of Exposure, the magazine published by the Society of Photographic Education, and her involvement with this 40-year-old institution, have given her a wise and informed vision, one that does not forget to be critical towards her own work.

We may need more books like Disappearing Witnesses, histories of photography written by insiders that would explain the history of photographic production as it developed in surroundings known and understood by the author.