The topic of photography presently affords an excellent case study in the changing styles, methods, and presumptions of art-historical practice. Once a new and marginal offshoot of a very traditional field, photography has become solidly entrenched within the new art histories, in part because the photographic medium lends itself so congenially to many contemporary theoretical preoccupations. At the same time, more traditional catalogues raisonnés, exhibition catalogues, and monographs devoted to the work of renowned photographers are being published. The history of photography is thus at a crossroad—or, rather, a fruitful zone of hybridity. Though occasionally productive of dialogic gaps between different communities of photographic art historians, this is a situation potentially affording richness and possibility. In this age, art-historical distinction and ambition can, and do, assume a wide range of very different forms. The authors of the two books presently under review are both fine scholars and able practitioners of the differing modes of art history they represent. Pairing a picture book and a lengthy dense text is paradigmatically a case of comparing apples and oranges, but these books, interestingly, represent opposite poles of scholarship. One is intended primarily for a serious popular audience, while the other is addressed to...