Image as Ruin: Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child

Allow me to posit a cinephilic contention: that cinema is perhaps the most formally complete of all art forms — or rather, a blistering confection of each: photography, performance, music, design, technology, to name only a few. And yet one could simultaneously argue that cinema is, above all else, a visual medium; a medium of images first and foremost. We grant the pictorial image onscreen the utmost attention and reverence, invest in it our deepest emotional weight, and all but...