Against Photography?

In 2006 Susie Linfield considered the canon of critical apprehension about the photographic medium in the Boston Review:

Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

(Linfield aslo has a great syllabus on the practice of criticism on her faculty website at NYU.)