"A. D. Coleman has been an influential figure in American photographic culture for many years. . . . As their punning titles indicate, Depth of Field is, as he says, 'more scholarly than the running commentary' collected in Light Readings. Its essays help to answer some big questions . . . Sometimes they do so by providing penetrating definitions . . . Sometimes they do so by examining more fully previous overzealous repudiations by the photographic establishment . . . [L]ike its companion volume, it illuminates an aspect of American culture and should be welcomed and assimilated by serious students of photography."

-- Mick Gidley, American Studies

-- Joseph Flack Weiler, Print World

-- Taylor Holliday, The Wall Street Journal

" . . . Among photography critics, Coleman is still peerless; while most writers conceal their sensibilities behind a mask of neutrality, Coleman has always been happiest admonishing the arrogant and praising the bold. . . . [He] has matured into a writer who is more concerned with the big ethical/philosophical questions than engaging with new talent."

-- Creative Camera (England)

"Since 1968, when the American photography critic A. D. Coleman began a career as a freelance writer independent of the censorship of an employer, he has functioned as the guardian of photography. In innumerable articles he has pointed out injustices and problems in exhibition concepts and photohistorical literature . . . [Depth of Field features] a bouquet of the thistles with which Coleman had presented the institutions of photography in the period 1978-1996. . . . In the first essay in the book, "The Destruction Business," he takes on a classic academic issue, the definition of the role of the critic, and offers his own definition of criticism as a destructive act. . . . In other essays Coleman functions as a historian of concepts. . . . It is a thankless, but at the same time necessary task, which like Coleman's other analyses is typified by a thoroughness and clarity that give the reader a sense of the fruitful and constructive potential of destruction."

-- Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, Katalog (Denmark)

. . . What is most perturbing in the current spate of debunking is its lack of technical understanding, the absence of sufficient historical grounding, and its assumption that, despite the current disarray and disagreement in the field, there is some fixed standard against which Curtis's work can be easily weighed and thereby impeached.

For better or worse, there is no such standard. According to one source, "At the very foundation of this confusion is the lack of a coherent critical vocabulary for the field." I would go further, to suggest that the problem is the field's awareness of the applicability to its actions of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, which proposes that concept dictates percept, and perturbation theory, which holds that observation changes the thing observed. . . . Derral Cheatwood and Clarice Stasz bring the lesson home: "The belief that there is an external, constant and absolute reality which can be recorded, measured, or analyzed with photography or sociology -- and is therefore independent of the activity of the two fields -- constitutes the reality fallacy." In light of this consensus -- possibly the only agreement in the field -- how seriously can one take a naive critique like [Christopher] Lyman's, based on enduring faith in the possibility of "objective ethnographic documentation"?

-- From "Edward S. Curtis: The Photographer as Ethnologist."

. . . Who is William Mortensen? You might well ask. And, until quite recently, you could have searched all the standard histories of photography in vain for an answer. William Mortensen (1897-1965) is -- among many other things -- one of photography's object lessons in how individuals become lost to history. . . .

The frequently-proferred justification for Mortensen's erasure is that purism was waxing and pictorialism on the wane during this period. That is true, but insufficient as an explanation -- and considerably disingenuous as well. In fact, though nominally pledged to the impartiality of scholarship, both the Gernsheims and the Newhalls were highly biased in their approach to photography's history. They shared an intense attitudinal and aesthetic commitment to advocacy of the "straight/purist" stance; their distaste for any form of "manipulated" imagery was repeatedly made clear. (The Newhalls, in addition, were already becoming entangled in elaborate personal and professional relationships with members of the f.64 Group, particularly Weston and Adams. To their discredit, they allowed their prejudices and allegiances to overrule their obligations to the discipline of historianship. . . . Indeed, [Ansel] Adams's vendetta pursued Mortensen even beyond the grave, and well into the terrain of outright censorship and blackmail.

-- From "Conspicuous By His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen."

So cowed has that audience become by high-financed art-world propaganda that many of them have taken to parading around wearing on their heads, their handbags, their chests and backs -- in the form of buttons and T-shirts and stickers -- one of the most idiotic slogans I've ever come across. It emerged in the early '90s, during the NEA flap just previously mentioned, and it reads, in its entirety, "Fear No Art."

The fatuousness of this notion steals the breath away. It implies, nonsensically, that all art is good (and, presumably, good for you!) -- and, at the same time, that art as a phenomenon is powerless, incapable of doing you harm. All of these insinuations are lies. . . . Proposing that art at its most potent poses no genuine threat to anyone or anything resembles nothing so much as telling your houseguests that your growling dog is toothless and can do them no worse harm than pissing on their shoes. I have a higher respect for the impact of art on culture than that. Were I given to button-wearing, in fact, mine on this subject would read thus:
Fearsome Art!
(and more of it)

-- From "The Destruction Business: Some Thoughts on the Function of Criticism."