Four Great Photography Books Where Words Add Power to Pictures

For a documentary photographer who seeks to change the world, images go only so far. Dorothea Lange, a pioneer in the field, put it simply: All photographs, she said, “can be fortified by words.”

 

Photographs raise questions; they rarely provide answers. In the face of suffering and injustice, they are far better at evoking feeling than thought, at arousing empathy or horror, not at winning an argument. And so, photographers turn to words. Their challenge is to decide when it is better simply to show and at what point they must step forward to tell.

 

The risk is that a sea of words will drown pictures, not strengthen them. That was the case, for me, with the later portraits in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The show opens with compelling family photographs that require only brief captions. But the portraits that record people struggling with contaminated water in Flint, Mich., and with the closing of an automobile factory in Lordstown, Ohio, are embellished by long wall texts that dutifully examine circumstances too complicated for pictures to parse.