grant life earlier in the century as it is of photographs of current social situations. Any photograph of domestic or foreign strife, for example, must be analyzed to determine what the photographer was trying to convey and should not be accepted as objective reality. At the same time, the authors' interpretation of photographs is also full of biases and choices which may or may not be true. They say that it is up to historians to interpret photographs, but it is also up to the non-historian to interpret the historians' interpretation. For example, Davidson and Lytle in their scrutiny of Riis' photograph of a tenement-house yard find many signs of hominess and community that they are certainly open to other more desperate interpretations (226). The historian has no more wisdom than any insightful non-historian. Nevertheless, the authors are correct in arguing that the viewer should not simply assume that the photographer is presenting an
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