Rebecca Bengal’s Strange Hours is an absorbing collection of seventeen essays originally printed in publications including Aperture, Vogue, and Vanity Fair that map the writer’s recent entanglements with photographers, photographs, and photobooks. Bengal strikes a balance between essays featuring established, late-career art stars like Nan Goldin and emerging names like Horace Poolaw, whose pictures have only recently gained critical repute. Bending a breadth of genres including art criticism, travelog, and autobiography, the crux of the book is stated plainly in Joy Williams’s perceptive foreword: what is the relationship between the autonomy of the photographic image and the words that attempt to make sense of it? Bengal’s formal education in fiction offers her prose a sense of familiarity that is refreshingly colloquial in comparison to the stereotypically pedantic vernacular of conventional art criticism. For this reason, Strange Hours is utterly readable, compelling, and reminiscent of the late Dave Hickey’s...

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