Book Review

For over a decade now, scholarship on photography has focused as much on the person behind the camera as on the subject in front of it. Alan Trachtenberg, James Curtis, Laura Wexler, and others have mined the rich depths of photographers' personal circumstances, political motivations, and cultural values in order to explore meaning in the visual images they created. David P. Peeler offers an ambitious contribution in that tradition with this exhaustively researched study that probes the minds of four men whose camera work not only shaped American modernism but brought photography securely into the realm of fine art. By examining the dominant ideas that preoccupied Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, Peeler explains how each man intellectually confronted the world and then used a camera to make sense of those encounters. Having organized his study biographically, Peeler tracks the artistic evolution of each photographer separately, moving seamlessly from one to another at the crucial places where their lives and beliefs intersected. The near-maniacal power and influence wielded by Stieglitz resonates throughout Peeler's argument, capped in one of the last chapters by Adams's exultant exclamation to his wife that he had finally been accepted by the great man.

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