The Empirical Photographer is a selection of the best of Mike Johnston's writings on the subject of photography from the years 1984 to 1994. It's a rigorous selection, winnowing over 100 published and unpublished essays and articles down to 14. The essays include several that were notorious or controversial when first published, including "The Fashion Photographer's Nightmare: Richard Avedon in the American West," and a revisionist review of a Paul Strand show that provoked both admiration and outrage among the readers of the magazine in which it appeared.

Johnston has been a magazine editor and writer for his whole career, and often writes about techniques and products for hobbyists. However, none of the inclusions in The Empirical Photographer are technical. Rather, they are concerned more with the intangibles of the practice of photography as an expressive medium, ranging from conventional show and book reviews to extended essays that are essentially didactic, but also original and uniquely entertaining. As one reader put it, "I marvel at Mike Johnston's capacity to write so knowledgeably on a spectrum of topics.... I know how demanding it is to stay in touch with wide-ranging material, write about it in a fresh way, and make it meaningful to a varied audience."