MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewBig stretches of Withers’s life get a fairly cursory look, and Lauterbach basically calls it a day after King’s assassination in 1968, dispatching the photographer’s subsequent four decades in an introductory chapter and an afterword. Nor is this a book about photography history, examining the photographs the way an art historian might ... Instead what Lauterbach...is going for is a loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. He’s done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King. Weirdly, though, his very thoroughness and deep interest in this time and place have the almost certainly unintended effect of diminishing Withers rather than keeping him front and center ... Bluff City may not get to Withers’s inner life, but it is not without pleasure. Lauterbach is justifiably sympathetic to his subject ... In his first chapter, he describes a day in 2005 when he dropped by Withers’s studio for a tour and got a lift home from the photographer in that old sedan. \'He drove—in a manner many people familiar with Memphis will recognize — slowly, drifting right.\' That kind of describes his book, too.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
