The Lives of Images Vol. 2

The second volume in Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa's ongoing series of photography criticism continues the project established in the first: close, sustained readings of individual photographs and photographers that take the image seriously as an object of sustained attention rather than illustration or evidence. The essays collected here engage with work by a range of photographers including Carrie Mae Weems, Paul Graham, Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, and others, organized not around national or stylistic categories but around questions of what photographs do and what they withhold. Wolukau-Wanambwa writes with precision and without jargon, and the criticism consistently returns to the specific material and formal properties of the photographs under discussion.

Like the first volume, this book was published by MACK and has been widely adopted in graduate photography and art history programs as a model of engaged photographic criticism. It rewards readers already familiar with the photographers discussed and those encountering the work for the first time.