Art: Mirrors and Windows

In the past ten years photography has swept, as it were, from the magazine to the museum. There is no debate left on whether photography is an art; it is universally accepted as such, although the arguments for this or that aesthetic of photography are as brisk and rancorous as ever. Avidly collected, taught on an industrial scale, buoyed up by reams of historical exegesis and critical debate, photography in America has moved into the public eye, rather as painting did in the 1960s, and...