Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990: A Critical Anthology

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by Jordan Smith

Much of the early writing about photography seems more symptomatic than descriptive, responding less to the images themselves than to the wonder and anxiety aroused by the uncanny ability of the medium to combine stillness and accuracy. The precise presence of time's undoing has unsettled writers from the onset, from the daguerreotype era to Barthes and Sontag. (Although neither Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photographs [1981, by Roland Barthes] nor On Photography [1977, by Susan Sontag] are excerpted in this anthology, there is no lack of nineteenth-century precedent for their meditations on the photograph's uncanny reference to both life and death in the same gesture.) "I have what I wished," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle on receipt of the latter's daguerreotype, "I confirm my recollections & I make new observations: it is life to life." But Carlyle, gazing doubtfully on his own new likeness of Emerson, "this poor Shadow," finds the image "altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me," and frets that "here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, full of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, good humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades as of the valley of Death." Even Whitman, a poet committed to finding the soul in any multitude, was unsettled on a visit to Plumbe's Daguerreotype gallery, finding himself surrounded by "a great legion of human faces - human eyes gazing silently but fixedly upon you, and creating an impression of an immense Phantom concourse - speechless and motionless, but yet realities." His praise of the "life-look of the eye - that soul of the face!" is as edgily hyperbolic as Baudelaire's fear that photography meant the end of art as anything but mass-produced, mass-consumed representation: "if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us!"

"Don't try to imitate photographers," a fine poet once warned me. "They're much better at it than we are." It is proverbial that there is an affront to writerly authenticity in the speed and detail of the photographer's art. The wit of Samuel Butler's discovery - on July 19, 1891 - of Chaucer's Wife of Bath in a woman lunching in the cabin of the ship Lord of the Isles can be recognized in less time than it takes to read his account of how, as the shutter tripped, she "put her hand up to her mouth at that very moment and rather spoiled herself, but not much." Language seems a drudge in the face of such immediacies: Sophia Tolstoy's portrait of Leo Tolstoy at his desk (c. 1907) or Nadar's Charles Baudelaire (c. 1855); J. M. Synge's symmetry, Spinning (1898), an image of two Aran island women set with their wheel in a composition of stone and sky; Maxime Du Camp's Maison et Jardin dans le quartier frank (1852), a landscape with crumbling houses and the oddly formal, intense, small figure of a man in the foreground, taken during Du Camp's trip to the Middle East with Gustave Flaubert. All are marvelous works of the moment, subject to interrogation or contemplation but still offering in an instant of recognition the kind of revelation that most writers' prose must earn by passage through the time of narrative, the time of thought.

Perhaps this is why writers often seem compelled to tell the story behind the picture. The presence of photographs, as Jane Rabb points out in her detailed and historically informative introductory essay, might suggest "that their words were insufficient or their readers verbally unsophisticated." Even Henry James, she reminds us, demonstrates an "evident wariness." His certainty that we would like to see the real shop depicted in Alvin Langdon Coburn's The Curiosity Shop (1907) - the frontispiece to Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904) - and his pointed refusal to help us find it, are both charming and defensive. He would rather leave us with the hint of another story, the "thrilling" problem of writer and photographer, wandering London in search of the actuality of James's imagination. Whatever a picture is worth, it cannot be the many thousand words of the novelist. John Updike can't look at Lee Friedlander's Maria Friedlander, New City, New York (1976: "clutching a towel to her with the same hand that holds glasses and a bra") without asking, "is the amorous curve descending or ascending from this point we glimpse, or is the point merely a pose, struck by request?" He would like to evoke a narrative of relationship, erotic or artistic, his own stock in trade. Yet the brilliance of Friedlander's photograph is that it eludes such descriptions, seeming almost an accident in the midst of life's details, not a point but a momentary intersection.

It is quite another matter, a measure of the heartfelt mediation of vision that makes literary time worth taking, to be moved by what is there, transported by it to some new condition of action or understanding, instructed, as in Richard Howard's reassessment of Robert Mapplethorpe: "I used to think Mapplethorpe's photography was grim with the restrictive occasions of obsession and fetishism," writes Howard, but this is before he has weighed the interplay of gravity and ascension in these photographs. In his revision, the tensile, unspent bodies of Dennis Speight, Lisa Lyons, Thomas, their "headlong architecture of antitheticals," become "emblems of contested mortality, grave with the contradictions of organic life in their aspiration to ecstasy." Howard's instruction is given as it is received; arising from the body's difficult presence in Mapplethorpe's work, it is drawn back, with commentary and complement, to the body of the viewer, "fond enemy and ally."