Amazon.com description: Product Description: From the front flap of this 307 page book: "As the main channel of visual communication and memory in the twentieth century, the photographic medium has been studied intermittently in various disciplines. Reflecting on years of special attention to photographs, Max Kozloff writes about them as a persistent critic. He argues that there is a difference between what photographs are said to represent and what they show, and that the radical material version of photographs produces truly startling appearances. The title essay, 'The Privileged Eye' , meditates at length on the shock of such appearances, as manifested in a single, highly charged image by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Throughout these wide-ranging essays, Kozloff keeps close to the experience of photographic imagery, linking discernment with freshness of visual contact. These essays describe what it feels like to be in the grip of photography's objectified world. Kozloff is continuously attracted to photographic images that slip away from familiar readings or provoke new ones. He writes to explore the ways images can or have changed - flattered, prejudiced, agitated - the social consciousness of viewers. Concerned with perception as animated by photographs, he assumes our sexual, moral, and political susceptibilities - above all our ideas of community - are caught up in the immediacy of perception. He shows how differently it can be affected, by the lyric gestures of Helen Levitt, for example, the rhetoric of the family of Cuban photographs of the revolution, the erotic passivity of a character imagined by Duane Michals, or the categories of pride and humiliation in the genre of war photography. Gathered from his journalism of the last six years, much of it originally published in 'Artforum' and 'Art in America', this is Max Kozloff's second volume of critical essays on photography."