Diana & Nikon

I have been wanting to read Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm's book about photography, for a long time.  The essays on photography  originally appeared in the New Yorker, and the collected articles were made into a book in 1980.

The book is not available in the branch library closest to me and I was about ready to buy it online.  The prices for Malcolm's book on Amazon seemed a bit steep, so I did a search to see what the options might be.  I was pleased to find a downloadable copy available at no cost on the Internet Archive website.  It is the expanded version published by Aperture in 1997 which contains five additional essays not in the original.

I've read just the first chapter so far, and it is excellent.  Malcolm casts a critical eye on several books about Stieglitz, Weston and Adams and comes up with quite a few stories about those pioneer modernists that I had not seen before.  As described in an Aperture article on Malcolm's photography writing, she had a decided preference for the fomalist style, but her knowledge and opinions about photography developed very substantially in the years she wrote for the New Yorker.

It is hard to find good writing about photography these days.  I can't think of anyone of Malcolm's stature being published now in the sources I used to look to. I think it is about five years since the NY Times stopped running the regular column by Teju Cole.  There are reviews of major exhibitions like the recent blockbuster show in New York of Diane Arbus' life work, but none show the depth of knowledge of Malcolm and some of her contemporaries like John Szarkowski, whose books can also be found in the Internet Archive.