This handsome, modestly (and conveniently!) -sized book was put together with a light, subtle hand, artists' hands, and the reader will be immediately seduced by the striking photographic work which is its primary raison d'être, but Human Documents: Eight Photographers was founded on a precise argument, which Robert Gardner makes quite clear with his spare, patrician prose in the introductory essay. Eliott Weinberger introduces variations on it (as well as further points of view of his own) in his supplementary essay, "Photography and Anthropology (a Contact Sheet)." The book is intended to bear witness to the connections between photography and anthropology, and both Gardner and Weinberger discuss the historical background to this inevitable, but not always easy relationship.