Between the Eyes : Essays on Photography and Politics

David Levi Strauss is a writer whose visual and intellectual sensibilities are both acute and expansive. His trenchant writings on photography and photographers have been collected for this volume from a broad range of magazines, including Aperture, Artforum and The Nation. In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Strauss tackles subjects as diverse as “Photography and Propaganda,” the imagery of dreams, Sebastiao Salgado's epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. The timely issue of photographic legitimacy is addressed in the essay “Photography and Belief,” and in “The Highest Degree of Illusion,” Strauss discusses the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11. As our world is shaped more and more by images and their slipperiness, what he calls a media “pandemonium” in its root meaning of “the place of all howling demons,” we need a mind and voice like Levi Strauss' to bring clarity to our vision.

In an era of social confusion and visual pandemonium, David Levi Strauss tackles issues of photography and politics in a way that few critics today are courageous enough to attempt. The essays collected in "Between the Eyes" address topics ranging from propaganda and the imagery of dreams, to Sebastião Salgado''s epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. Other issues broached here include the legitimacy of photographic imagery and the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11, as well as essays on the work of Ania Bien, Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Jaar, Joel-Peter Witkin and others, plus an interview with painter Leon Golub (who worked from photographs). Reviewing the first edition of "Between the Eyes," "Publisher''s Weekly" wrote: "''Photography and Propaganda, '' a study of the work and deaths in ''80s Central America of photojournalists Richard Cross and John Hoagland, should be required reading in the age of embeddedness, and ''Photography and Belief'' is a terrific meditation on truth in the age of digital manipulation."