Still the smartest thing anyone has written about looking at things.

You don't need to care about photography for this to work on you, which is lucky, because I don't much. I came to it sideways, after a row with a friend about a front page and whether printing that photograph was reporting or was appetite.

The first essay answers us both better than either of us managed. Photographs as acquisition — you take one, and the verb isn't an accident. The camera as a means of refusing an experience while appearing to honour it. The tourist who cannot be anywhere without converting it into a thing to have been. I read that section twice in one afternoon and then spent a week catching my own hand going to my pocket.

Against the usual charge, which is that all this is disapproval dressed as theory: she isn't scolding. She describes a technology honestly, including the good it does, and then declines to be sentimental about what it costs. That's a rarer posture than it sounds, and almost nobody managed it about the internet.

The weak spot is the final essay, which goes abstract in a manner the earlier ones earn the right to avoid, and the anthology of quotations at the back has always struck me as a notebook somebody talked her into publishing. Skip both if you like. The argument survives intact without them.

Nine. Written before anyone carried a camera at all times, and it reads as though that was exactly what she was writing about.