A couple years ago I wrote a review for Amazon on Katherine Hoffman's book: Stieglitz: A Beginning Light: The book was published by Yale university of all places.
----------------------------------------------------
The word, "Pedestrian" hardly captures the quality of the writing in this book. "Wooden" comes closer, but the English language doesn't seem to have a word that adequately can describe how wretched Ms. Hoffman's plodding account really is.
The book's only, barely redeeming features are some early, though not very well printed Stieglitz photographs, but many seem to be missing. Ms. Hoffman will go on and on about a Stieglitz photograph, describing the "triangular relationships" produced by this feature and the "horizontal orientation" that produces a sensation of "vastness" in the viewer. But when you riffle through the pages to see whether or not you get the "sensations" she's describing, you find that the photograph isn't in the book. In addition, the text seems to have been bowdlerized by the Yale University Press editors. For instance, on page 204 she quotes Stieglitz as writing, "On the contrary, the individual is free to follow their own light,..." I don't believe for a minute that Stieglitz, writing at the turn of the twientieth century, made that kind of grammatical error. This is PC at its worst!
What does it mean to be a "professor of Fine Arts?" This book more or less bears out the old saying that "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
All in all, this is a very disappointing book. It should have been much better than it is.
--------------------------------------------------------