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

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by Jordan Smith

And there are other forms of instruction here as well, of which the photograph is as much the evidence as the occasion. Gordon Parks's 1942 portrait of the Farm Service Administration charwoman is, in his view, "unsubtle. I overdid it and posed her, Grant Wood style, before the American flag, a broom in one hand, a mop in the other, staring straight into the camera." But the picture itself is as convincing, as moving, as Parks's account of how central his knowledge of this woman's life was to his own development as a photographer. Or Alexander Rodchenko's collage Lili and the Zoo Animals (1923), which recapitulates the rhythms, rhetorical and passionate, of Mayakovsky's ranting and romantic Pro Eto (1923), even as its images add to the poem's autobiographical force. Or Thomas Merton's The Soul's Hook (c. 1965) (a photograph depicting a hook dangling from nowhere in the space of a field) whose meaning is entirely altered by its title and the knowledge it suggests.

"The poignancy of the photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world," Allen Ginsberg says of his own snapshots, one of which is the famous 1953 image of Jack Kerouac standing on a fire escape on the lower east side of New York City with a brakeman's handbook in the pocket of his windbreaker and a cigarette in his mouth. According to Ginsberg, "The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred . . ." A fleeting moment, a floating world: the spooky tension of stillness and presence is resolved in the understanding that, like any art, photography does what it can in the face of time's attrition, which is never enough. It is such moments, when word and image cohabit, when writer and photographer forego preoccupation, judgment or mere reminiscence, which more than justify the premise and generous presence of this book. There are some notable omissions, such as Thom Gunn's incisive poem "Song of a Camera," (from his Passages of Joy, 1982) and it is an occasional frustration that images discussed in the text are not always reproduced on the page. Nor have all of the photographs been given the space they deserve. But there is far more to celebrate in this volume - Walker Evans's The Bridge (1930) which captures exactly the trajectory of Hart Crane's poem while sacrificing none of its own eloquence; the juxtapositions of Wright Morris's spare text and sparer image; Bertolt Brecht's deadpan "photograms"; Marianne Moore's fantasia on the Sports Illustrated photo of a polo pony; the literary portraits in picture and text of Jill Krementz and Elsa Dorfman; Michael Ondaatje's novelistic take on E. J. Bellocq; Duane Michael's delightfully, disturbingly off-kilter Things are Queer (1975). Although this book begins with the uncomfortable combination of hype and anxiety that greets any process of transformation in the insistent hands of those who simply want to get on with it, Rabb's anthology leaves the reader with the realization that our truest, most meaningful interactions are with art's representations of the conditions of life, not with the means or circumstances of artistic production.