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I appreciate the time and energy Weston Naef has taken from what must be a busy and demanding schedule to write his extensive reply to my article. I fear, though, that Naef’s schedule may have kept him from reading my piece as carefully as he might otherwise have done. How else can we explain his misunderstanding of the spirit and letter of much of what I wrote?

His most serious misunderstanding is his assumption that I “dislike” his book—that I am an “adversary” attempting a “high-handed” and “sweeping dismissal” of the work he and his colleagues have invested. Now, it would surprise me to learn that any Afterimage reader cared about my personal likes and dislikes—indeed, they’re not at all relevant to anyone but myself. Yet if anyone did feel the need for that information, I think a careful reading of my article would show that, in fact, I like and respect the beak a great deal.

As a matter of fact, I very consciously included in my review, among various other positive statements and implications, a sentence which reads: “All in all, it is a valuable addition to the general history of the medium.” I wrote this bald endorsement—which is really uncharacteristic of my articles—because I intended to discuss the book as a specific example of a general trend in history writing, yet felt a responsibility to first report some of the more positive aspects of the work.

About the headline of the article: as with many other periodicals, headline writing at Afterimage is done, not by authors, but by one individual with a knack for catchy phrases. A better headline might have been found, I suppose, but “Best{?) Of Brazil” does not, as Naef says it does, declare “the posture of adversary.” It asks a question.

As for Naef’s suggestion that bylines at Afterimage might have to do with the tone of an article, I need only direct him to yet another piece I did for that same March issue—a very positive, bylined report on the Newhall Fellowship inaugurated at the Museum of Modern Art (page 3).

Bylines are not given because of the relative importance of the content of an item, but as a reflection of the effort required of an author to produce his or her article, and the article’s quality as a piece of writing. “Museums acquire…” was one of many short items I do each month which combine the rewriting of press releases and other reports with some original interview material.

Naef confuses the function of a news story, like “Museums acquire…” with that of an analytical review. We at Afterimage are proud of the great amount of pure information we publish each month, because such straight, “deadpan” news reports give our readers the background which allows them to determine for themselves the “underlying philosophical implications” of any given event.

Naef raises the question of the difference between an extended exhibition catalogue and a book. While I chose not to deal with that question in my article (I’ve seen it discussed elsewhere) I will say, now, that the line between the two is frequently very fuzzy. Consider the following: a.) Nowhere in the Brazil book can I find the word “catalogue,” though, in fact, “book” is used quite often. b.) There is no exhibition checklist. c.) Someone (the publisher? Naef himself?) sent the book for review to our offices, 350 miles away from New York City. d.) It is common for books to appear simultaneously with exhibitions—in fact, it’s a sign of good planning. Does Naef consider his Era of Exploration a catalogue? Or any number of Aperture monographs? How about Newhall’s History of Photography? e.) If, instead of the review, I had written a “Received and Noted” item which said, “This is a catalogue to an exhibition; anyone who has not seen the show has no business buying or reading it,” how would Naef have responded?

All of this may ultimately be as irrelevant as whether or not I saw the show. As William Ivins (of whom Naef surely knows, as one of his predecessors in the Department of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) says in the final, summary sentence of his famous book, Prints and Visual Communication: “…at any given moment the accepted report of an event is of greater importance than the event, for what we think about and act upon is the symbolic report and not the event itself.”

There are no “distortions and misrepresentations” of which I’m aware in my article. There are, as Weston Naef points out, a number of questions. Naef suggests that I might have telephoned him to find the answers. But my questions—still not answered and perhaps unanswerable—are, as I state in the article, “about the practice of the history of photography,” and apply to the Naef/Ferrez bock only to the same extent as they apply to a great many other works of photo-history.

I would point out that Naef, by his lengthy examination of some of the issues raised by my piece, legitimates my raising them. What more could I have asked but that one of the authors himself would find my questions provocative enough to attempt some answers?

My article does not “treat the subject in a vacuum.” It relies upon the same context that an average, informed reader would have. As an Afterimage writer I have, I know, special access to Naef (or to others in jobs like his). But since my readers do not have this same access, I avoid making use of it when writing reviews. How would Naef deal with phone calls from all the 500 to 5000 or more people who read his book, should they have questions? A project like Pioneer Photographers should show some attempt to anticipate questions or objections.

Far from casting “aspersions” on Ferrez, I group him with such eminent collector-historians as Gernsheim, Jammes, Coke, and Darrah. I don’t suggest that he or they are “motivated by avarice,” though I do hint that, human nature being what it is, it may at times be difficult for people to keep a variety of interests from unconsciously coming into conflict. As I state in my article, these may not be financial interests, but the knowledge and love of objects possessed and cared for over a number of years. The best analogy I can think of would be to the biography of an artist written by a close friend or relative. Does Naef not take Dorothy Norman’s extreme devotion to Alfred Stieglitz into account when he reads her biography of Stieglitz?

I never doubted Naef’s (or Ferrez’s) sincerity in choosing the work represented in the book. And I can accept the very real possibility that there is no better “principal source of research information”—which is what the book’s foreword calls Ferrez—than the Brazilian co-author. But if Naef doesn’t see certain limitations of historical method (which, granted, may be unavoidable) in a source of information who is human, a collector of the material under study, and the grandson of one of the personages of Brazilian photographic history, he is not the historian I assumed him to be. I pointed these limitations out, not to belittle Ferrez’s important achievement, but as a reminder of the obligation we all share to keep things in perspective. Regardless of how fine a job the authors of Pioneer Photographers did, I would still feel the need for the perspectives of other authors.

Regarding blur and technical limitation: I do, in fact, “choose to believe” that most nineteenth century photographs which show the mark of such limitations are equal in terms of their creators’ intentions (though not, of course, in their effect on a modern viewer). It is the only logical and valid conclusion one could draw from the facts we have, without evidence (in any specific case) to the contrary. The closest thing to evidence Naef offers in his book is a description which, as I say in my review, could be applied to “any of thousands of photographs made about 1860.” If Naef could explain what he means by “figures… blurred in an attractive manner,” or could show (verbally or visually) how a set of blurs in a range of one person’s work differs from the blurs in another body of work, he would be providing support for his stylistic distinctions.

Furthermore, with or without such support, I would be very interested to know how many pictures by one photographer Naef feels it is sufficient to study for his analyses of style in photographs which look so much like responses to technical limitations. A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Fewer?

Naef, in his book, says that it is Ben. R. Mulock who has the “special sense” for motion blur, while in his letter he credits a different worker—Guilherme Gaensly. Of course, this is simply a mistake. But one could see it as quite a telling error, which says more about the relative interchangeability of some early work than I ever could.

It’s true, sad to say, that if different historians had chosen the work for Naef’s book, “it would have been very different.” It’s hard enough to try to mentally recreate the zeitgeist of 100 years ago, but too many editors fall prey to the temptation of work which looks best through contemporary eyes. (See Martha Chahroudi’s paper on this problem, presented to the recent Conference on Photographic Criticism and reprinted elsewhere in this issue, or my own “Nineteenth century photographs, twentieth century books,” Afterimage, December 1975, for further discussions of this question.) The trick, as I say in the Brazil review, “is to let the criteria for selecting pictures be determined by the material itself.” Perhaps Naef has done this—I’ve never been to Brazil, so I wouldn’t know. But it’s important that the early Brazilian work in the book looks like early work from the rest of the world, and, in considering this, important that we be aware of the problem faced by editors.

Though Naef does devote about two pages to discussion of the work of Hercules Florence, it is true that it was apparent that there might have been more. I simply assumed Naef did what he could under the circumstances which I had heard, from reliable sources, he faced. I was not about to announce to the world that a Brazilian historian was reportedly accusing Naef of appropriating his research for the Artforum article Naef wrote on Florence (February 1976), especially because I did not know the whole story and couldn’t phone Brazil to get that half of it. As for the Florence family’s refusal to allow Naef to publish the illustrations from the inventor’s notebooks: The family appeared last year in Rochester—the original documents in hand—with Boris Kossoy (the Brazilian scholar who claims priority of research). This suggests that they have chosen sides in the matter, and it could explain Naef’s difficulty in getting permission to reproduce Florence’s drawings. It is, indeed, “a fascinating chapter in the sociology of photographic history.”

Naef implies that I did not “intend an even handed assessment” of his book, citing my decision not to mention the “quality” of the reproductions as one proof. Though I do not want to go deeply into the question of reproduction of historical material again (I’ve already discussed the issue in “Nineteenth century photographs…),” I will make a couple of points.

First, I question the necessity of reproducing nineteenth century vernacular photographs by an expensive process developed to convey the intentional subtleties of contemporary art photographs. To be sure, the reproductions in the book are attractive in their detail and tonal gradations, but competent use of less costly materials and processes might have allowed a far greater number of pictures to be presented, thus showing us more about Brazilian photography. Look, as an example, at the recent special issue of the Canadian OVO Photo magazine on Lewis Hine, which, for $2.0O, presents 48 well-reproduced Hine photos in their original size. Compare this with the recent Aperture book, printed by Rapoport, which gives you 86 Hine pictures for $22.5O. At the OVO Photo price-per-reproduction, $22.50 could buy a 535-photograph catalogue of some of Hine’s lesser known work, rather than another decoration for our already overloaded coffee tables.

So it is with the Brazil book. I’ll take useful information over functionless “delicate renderings,” qualify ideas over quality printing, any day.

Second, I’m not so sure the reproductions in the book are all that accurate anyway. They are nowhere near the color of most albumen prints I’ve seen, and the contrasts seem especially harsh. But I wanted to avoid petty technical questions regarding book design because I value the information the book provides.

I believe my article addressed important issues in historical research and writing which are exemplified by Pioneer Photographers of Brazil. I leave it to Afterimage readers to decide whether it is an ad hominem attack.