Photography from both sides of the lens

Diane Arbus made arresting, absorbing photographs of dwarfs, twins, giants, nudists and carnies. "I really believe," she said, "there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them." Together with other artists expanding the boundaries of photography in the 1960s, she altered the way we understand portraiture and thus the way we see people. She was criticized, most notably by Susan Sontag, for providing the cheap thrills of gazing at freaks. She was applauded by casual viewers, collectors and her fellow-artists for turning the idea of the outsider into a compelling investigation of the possibilities and limits of representing otherness - of picturing people with whom connections are never simple, always frayed. The images stopped us in our tracks and stayed in our minds.

In An Emergency in Slow Motion, William Todd Schultz rushes toward Arbus convinced of the viability of psychobiography, of using general research findings in psychology to make sense of individual lives. He has written on madness and creativity, and on Truman Capote; in this book he discusses Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, to name just some of the troubled stars that grab his attention. He professes modesty, talking of truth as a direction, not a destination, and of not being able to resolve the mysteries that are part of any complex personality. His goal "is to make sense of Diane Arbus's psychological life . . . the subjective origins of the pictures themselves."

Alas, An Emergency in Slow Motion doesn't provide a convincing account of the subjective origins of the pictures because Schultz gives no indication that he has looked closely at them or done the basic research about how they were made. The book is handicapped by having no illustrations whatsoever - perhaps he couldn't get permissions from the famously controlling Arbus estate.

Aside from a few interviews, he seems to have done almost no primary historical research and little reading in the history of photography.

Schultz does use a wide range of psychological theories. As if they were varieties of pasta, he throws them against the Arbus "case" to see what might stick. At times this is so trite as to be comical: "There's a personality dimension Arbus was unusually high in, a so-called 'artist type.' " He tells us she was high in "O," which means she was "open to experience."

The perfect antidote to Schultz's uninformed banalities about Arbus's pictures is Errol Morris's detailed explorations of photography's connection to the real world. Morris is a great documentary filmmaker who has expanded the limits of that genre, and in recent years he has been blogging about photography for the New York Times. The chapters of Believing is Seeing are taken from those blog posts, which show the author doggedly investigating entrenched assumptions about photographers and their pictures. Can one tell if Roger Fenton moved cannonballs around for dramatic effect in his pictures from the Crimean War? Was Sabrina Harman really smiling over the dead body in Abu Graib, or was it a "just say cheese" smile? Did Walker Evans add his own alarm clock to a documentary picture of a fireplace?

Facts matter to Morris, as he proves by doing basic detective work. He engages in archival research, he interviews experts, and he presses skeptically against theories and assumptions. He prides himself on "a combination of the prurient with the pedantic," and the mixture works just as well in this book as it does in his films. Facts matter in the way that photographs matter: They tell us something but never reveal the whole story.

Photographs edit reality; they conceal even as they reveal. But Morris doesn't rest at this level of generality. He wants to determine how this picture edits a particular reality, how that photographer tends to conceal certain aspects of reality in order to highlight others. Morris asks whether a photograph can document reality, function as propaganda and also be art. His answer is a resounding "yes!" The mysteries of photography stem in part from its never being able to tell the whole truth but almost always having something to say about the ways things were.