In the spring of 1968 I became a full-time freelance writer specializing in photography criticism.

I began writing about photography because I was excited by photographs, curious about the medium, and fascinated -- even frightened -- by its impact on our culture. I still feel that way.

My first pieces appeared in the Village Voice, in a regular column called "Latent Image." Between 1968 and 1974, my primary forums were the Voice, Popular Photography, and the Arts and Leisure Section of the Sunday New York Times; I was a regular columnist for all three simultaneously. Since 1974, I have written for a diverse group of periodicals, with Camera 35 my most frequent outlet. During this decade I wrote well over four hundred articles on various critical, historical, educational, and cultural aspects of photography. That volume astonishes me now; I do not think I could match it again.

The quantity of that output had much to do with the specific nature of my involvement with photography as I initially conceived and undertook it. I intended my work to be an interconnected running commentary on photographs and photography itself -- a form of journalism, in the diaristic sense of the word, as well as a critical interaction with the medium.

When I started, photography was entering that state of evolution and redefinition which in the past few years has brought it increased critical attention and a much-widened audience. Though I prophesied that eventuality, and proselytized for it, I think I never really expected it to happen. While I have my reservations about many of the side effects, I'm glad that it came about; I believe the attention -- and the audience -- will be rewarded.

So much seemed to be happening in photography at that point, and my knowledge of and background in the medium were so scant, that I did not presume to function as an authority or an arbiter of taste. Those roles don't attract me; and my youth, inexperience, and lack of an overview made them impossible in any case. What I hoped to do was to exemplify the possibility of engaging on a personal level, emotionally and intellectually, with a wide range of photographic imagery in an articulate and meaningful fashion, thereby provoking others to do the same.

Because so much was going on, and so few were writing about it, I was leery of functioning as an intentional filter -- that is, I was reluctant to exclude from my consideration anything that seemed even remotely pertinent. I wanted my function to be that of a synapse in the medium: a message center, a bridge between the origin of communication and its destination. So I embraced and tried to deal with almost everything that came my way or could be ferreted out, let it all pass through me and, as best I could, turned the experience into words. For a while it was possible to maintain at least the illusion that I was ingesting almost everything there was (on the East Coast, at any rate); but by the early 1970s that had become patently impossible, and my understanding of my task began to change. By late 1974 I had virtually ceased writing about exhibits and monographs. Partly that was due to the sudden lack of access to effective forums for such discussions, partly to shifts in my own attitudes.

This book is an attempt to reconstruct this evolution, in public, of a critical overview and vocabulary pertaining to the medium of photography. It is also a quite personal and surely idiosyncratic account of a crucial period in the medium's growth, somewhat limited by its geographical fix on New York but still more extensive an eyewitness chronicle than anything else of which I'm aware. And it is a collection of my favorite essays, judged from my standpoint as a writer.

Except for minor corrections and alterations, I have not rewritten these pieces; rewriting would have made this a different kind of book. The early pieces, by and large, are quick and tentative responses to the works with which they engage. But I see them now as necessary steps in the ongoing critical process of coming to terms with individual bodies of work as they evolve, take shape, and are nurtured by their makers. That, in part, was the point of them originally, and is certainly part of my purpose in including them here. From an autobiographical standpoint, I wanted to indicate something of my own fallibility and naivete, and to suggest by example that critical ideas can be thought of as exploratory and mutable -- sometimes drastically so, as can be seen for example in my writings about Paul Strand. The pieces dating from 1973 through 1978 are generally more considered essays.

The book focuses on the work of younger, less-established photographers; that was the emphasis in the total body of writing from which these pieces have been selected. The few essays about better-known photographers that appear were included either because I felt the piece was a reconsideration which departed markedly from the established critical consensus, or because I felt the subjects hadn't received the attention their contributions merited.

Even within those parameters, however, there are glaring omissions -- dozens of less-established and/or younger photographers whose names should appear in any comprehensive survey of the past quarter-century's activity in photography. But this book is not intended to be such a survey. Many people whose work I find highly important are herein referred to only in passing, if at all -- sometimes because my writing about them did not do justice to their work, or was otherwise ephemeral; sometimes because the occasion for writing about their work did not arise. Such absences therefore should not be taken as value judgments. Those represented here are only the tip of the iceberg.

Finally, I would like to note several professional stances which I feel have had distinct shaping effects upon my work. One was the decision to be and to remain a freelance writer, a status I retained even as a weekly contributor to the Village Voice and a bi-weekly contributor to the New York Times. This choice was made in order to leave myself ultimately accountable to no editorial policies save my own. I have never regretted it.

The other was the early decision to write only about publicly presented work: books, magazines, exhibitions, and other events which were open to everyone. I have not gone into the studio to examine work to which readers do not have access, nor have I asked image-makers to explain their creations to me and reported those explanations as if they were my own. Nor have I written about work which my readers cannot experience for themselves. I consider such writing to be a form of speculative fiction. In such cases, the danger is run of the criticism supplanting the work. I have always kept in mind as an operating principle that the work is primary and the criticism secondary, regardless of the relative quality of the two. The main functlon of criticism, I believe, should be to provoke other personal dialogues with the primary works.

Yet, having said all that, I must also say that I have my own biases and predilections, as I'm sure will be apparent. A good question for members of any audience to keep in mind is "What's being filtered out?" That question should always be asked when dealing with any form of human communication that's reached the andience through one or more intermediaries. An audience is entitled -- and expected -- to form its own opinions.

I hope this book will be of some interest and use to the general public, to students of photography and of contemporary communicative/creatlve media, and to photographers. If the general public can learn from this book something about what's behind the current ferment in the medium, and be encouraged to engage with it more actively as an andience; if students (and teachers) can find it effective in generating a more articulate responsiveness to the full diversity of photographic imagery; and if photographers of all stripes can encounter herein at least some of their attitudes, ideas, concerns, and intentions enunciated in ways with which they would not entirely disagree -- I'll be more than happy.

In concluding, I wish to give credit to four people whose writings about imagery, about photography, and about communicative media were highly influential on my own, particularly at the outset: William N. Ivins, Marshall McLuhan, Minor White, and Ralph Hattersley. Had I not encountered their work, I might never have started all this.