"Morris's book is beautifully designed, underscoring that visual evidence has its own texture, its own feel. Like Arbus, Morris knows that photographs gratify some of our deep cravings, but also that they also never fully satisfy. A photograph "partially takes us outside ourselves" and "gives us a glimpse . of something real." This is a key part of what Arbus and Morris are both after. Photography's preservation of traces of the past offers the possibility that "we too can be saved from oblivion by an image that reaches beyond our lives." By paying such close and caring attention to traces of the past, Morris greatly increases the possibility of their living on. He shows us what it means to do the hard work of saving memories from oblivion.

" -Michael Roth, The Washington Post "Morris brings an insatiable and contagious curiosity throughout to the convolutions that arise between art and truth telling." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) ".Morris's book feels less like traditional photography criticism than like the novels of W. G. Sebald, which are similarly obsessed with truth, memory and war. We get odd, absorbing pictures of Mayan ruins, of Picasso and his mistress, of the high heels worn by Morris's tour guide in Crimea: shanks, shoes, a shadow (presumably the photographer's) falling across the once boot-trodden road. Like extra problem sets in a textbook, these photos offer us additional opportunities to practice the art of looking, while simultaneously multiplying the scale of, as Morris's subtitle puts it, 'the mysteries of photography.'" - New York Times Book Review " Believing Is Seeing is an important book: It reminds us, at a time when it is remarkably easy to manipulate images and we are daily inundated with more and more of them, to ask: 'What, after all, are we looking at?'" - Wall Street Journal "[A]n elegantly conceived and ingeniously constructed work of cultural psycho-anthropology wrapped around a warning about the dangers of drawing inferences about the motives of photographers based on the split-second snapshots of life that they present to us.

It's also a cautionary lesson for navigating a world in which, more and more, we fashion our notions of truth from the flickering apparitions dancing before our eyes." - Los Angeles Times "Delightfully conversational." - Boston Globe ".simultaneously bewildering and thrilling, like finding a fathomless secret world hidden behind the seeming simplicity of everyday life." - Salon "Morris' assiduous and profound inquiry into the relationship between reality and photography is eye-opening, mind-expanding, and essential in this age of ubiquitous digital images." - Booklist (starred review) "Students of photography-and fans of CSI-will find this a provocative, memorable book." - Kirkus Reviews.