Literature welcomed photography in 1839. Notwithstanding its potentially universal appeal and infinite documentary and imaginative possibilities, photography (writing with light, etymologically) posed no threat to the older literary medium. The two interacted in an expanded aesthetic universe—warily from 1839 to 1914, amicably from 1918 to 1945, and vigorously from 1946 to the millennium.
1839-1914
Photography soon allied itself with literature. Henry Talbot's pioneering Sun Pictures of Scotland (1845) showed landmarks from the celebrated works of Sir Walter Scott, and his Scottish disciples staged tableaux from Scott and Robert Burns. Authors, especially Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, exploited the self-portrait. Publishers inserted photographs in popular works like Hawthorne's Marble Faun (1860), and photographically illustrated books featured settings described by canonical writers. George Washington Wilson issued a folio of Scottish landscapes to be bound into Queen Victoria's best-selling Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868).
Some authors, like Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Emerson, pondered photography's capabilities and implications; others—Théophile Gautier in Spain (1840), Maxime Du Camp, accompanied by Gustave Flaubert, in Egypt (1849-50)—tested them pragmatically. Literary admirers like George Sand encouraged Nadar's aerial and underground photography experiments in Paris. At the same time, literary realism flourished. Photography set a standard of veracity, while suggesting new ways of viewing and representing reality. Émile Zola (himself a keen photographer) emulated the camera's mirroring of society. Heinrich Heine and August Strindberg felt complimented when their writing was called ‘photographic’, although critics sometimes used the term pejoratively, implying imaginative deficiency. Novelists and playwrights made various symbolic and practical uses of photography. Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851) featured a photographer as romantic hero, Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1884) another as an obtuse eccentric. Fictional photographs tracked the lovers' relationship in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-7); Mathew Brady's Civil War scenes influenced Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895).
Many authors became avid photographers: not only Zola but Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Samuel Butler, Victor Hugo, Strindberg, Bret Harte, Pierre Louÿs, George Bernard Shaw, Giovanni Verga, and Leonid Andreyev, but often so discreetly that biographers remained ignorant or dismissive. All resisted photographic illustrations of their writing. Henry James, who used Alvin Langdon Coburn's photographs as frontispieces for his collected works, famously mingled his praise with wariness about their competitiveness in his preface to The Golden Bowl (1909).
Photographers seeking to elevate their own artistic status similarly remained aloof from literature. Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron occasionally borrowed subjects from literary classics. F. Holland Day, Coburn, and Edward Steichen esteemed Maurice Maeterlinck, whose mysticism offered an alternative to prevailing realism. Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White created scenes for magazines, but other pictorialists, promoting photography as art, generally preferred their own visual narratives. Few embraced Sadakichi Hartmann's idea for a ‘Photographic Illustration Company’ to provide a visual accompaniment to literary texts.
1918-1945
After the First World War, all the arts sought new systems and beliefs. Literature proclaimed traditional forms and content bankrupt; photography demanded recognition for aesthetic as well as documentary qualities. Faster transportation and communication multiplied interactions. Mexico City alone found D. H. Lawrence seeking Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson rooming with Langston Hughes, and Pablo Neruda meeting Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Octavio Paz. These encounters, especially those pertaining to Surrealism, disseminated innovations, sometimes displayed at venues like Shakespeare & Company's bookshop in Paris.
Cross-fertilization gratified young artists like Walker Evans, who chose photographing over writing (like André Kertész and László Moholy-Nagy), yet appreciated their shared qualities. Disliking pictorialist manipulations, photographers like Man Ray and Paul Strand valued ‘straight’ or ‘experimental’ pictures, featuring mechanical, natural, or abstract objects, not figures or landscapes. Disliking lengthy panoramas, writers like Virginia Woolf and Sherwood Anderson valued shorter, patterned structures, evoking the inner life of ordinary subjects. Regardless of medium, modernists sought whatever deepened insight.
Few inter-war artists were talented in both media, unless circumstances compelled (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Rodchenko in post-revolutionary Russia). Fears about independence, competition, and cost still discouraged collaboration. Dadaists and Surrealists ignored André Breton's call for books illustrated solely by photographs, except in esoteric, often erotic, limited editions. Stieglitz's circle did not even illustrate the literature they admired. But modernists proved generous publicists. Jean Cocteau first praised Man Ray's photograms; Stieglitz first published Gertrude Stein; Carl Sandburg wrote the first monograph about a living photographer (Steichen, his brother-in-law); Henry Miller's first novel immortalized Brassaï, whose memoirs helped immortalize Miller.
Few writer-photographers persisted. Carl Van Vechten ended a successful career as an art critic and novelist to pursue photography (1932); Wright Morris commenced his nostagic ‘photo-texts’. Some documented exotic assignments (Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia, W.H. Auden in Iceland and China). By 1940 William Faulkner's intense interest in photography, especially old cameras, dwindled and Eudora Welty ceased photographing professionally when publishers recognized her fiction.
As in the previous century, authors often mined photography for content. Pictures, usually of lost parents or lovers, inspired many meditations (Rainer Maria Rilke, Constantine Cavafy, Thomas Hardy). Thomas Mann utilized X-rays in The Magic Mountain (1924), Vladimir Nabokov the photo horoscope in Invitation to a Beheading (1938). But many still disdained the medium. Calling Margaret Bourke-White a ‘poetess of the camera’ was complimentary; E. M. Forster's description of Sinclair Lewis's style as ‘photographic’ was derogatory. Few shared Charles Sheeler's equation of his prints with poems by his friend William Carlos Williams.
The Depression and the Second World War made non-documentary art seem frivolous or perilous. Global crises compelled writers and photographers to collaborate in representing the latest disaster—in books, but also in photo-essays for new illustrated magazines like Life. Kurt Tucholsky helped John Heartfield assemble his anti-Nazi photomontages; Erskine Caldwell joined Bourke-White and James Agee Evans in recording America's South. Farm Security Administration photographs illustrated texts by Archibald MacLeish (1938) and Richard Wright (1941). Bertolt Brecht in exile protested against fascism and capitalism in quatrains, later published under the news photograph inspiring each (1955). Such engaged undertakings revealed that even documentaries could be framed, cropped, or airbrushed to influence response; texts ceased to emulate the camera's supposed dispassion.
1945-2000
With peace, artists gladly abandoned the grim subjects so long monopolizing attention; but the only visions most dared represent were their own. Many photographers, even former aspiring writers like Aaron Siskind and Minor White, turned from documentary to personal or abstract work. Authors too favoured the subjective or unconventional. Autobiography flourished in both media. Cecil Beaton's diaries, and memoirs by Coburn, Man Ray, Gisèle Freund, and Bourke-White helped make them as famous as writers. Even before conglomerates acquired publishing houses and photographs became valuable, dealers relished celebrity. Noted writers became the subjects of visual sequences by Rollie McKenna, Inge Morath, and Jill Krementz, who specialized in literary portraits for book jackets and publicity, adding renown to their subjects (often their friends or spouses) and themselves.
Significant collaborations, increasingly born from commerce rather than creativity, increased—often initiated by photographers, not writers or publishers. Richard Avedon approached Truman Capote and James Baldwin, as did Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes, Lucien Clergue Cocteau, and Eikoh Hosoe Yukio Mishima. (But Ted Hughes proposed collaboration with Fay Godwin.) Noted writers provided prefaces for photographers' publications: Lawrence Durrell for Brassaï and Bill Brandt; Tom Wolfe for Marie Cosindas, Bruce Chatwin for Robert Mapplethorpe.
Young photographers often yearned to be auteurs, presenting their own free-standing narratives. Reinforcing their aspirations were cultural critics like Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, who challenged the traditional assumptions of all the arts and favoured the fragmentary, inconclusive, and subjective; and Roland Barthes, whose seminal Camera Lucida (1980), translated by the poet Richard Howard, analysed images as well as narrative. Issues of class, genre, race, and sexual orientation became part of discourse in all the visual arts, especially photography, as they had always been of literary ones. Heated cultural debates featured photography as best reflecting postmodernist concerns, its pictures ‘texts’ to be ‘read’ on many levels by everyone, not only elites. Photographers dared to embrace formerly taboo literature, many specially equipped. Hosoe, John Baldessari, and Elsa Dorfman considered writing careers; Robert Adams earned a doctorate in English, Sally Mann a master's degree in writing; Danny Lyon and Bruce Charlesworth often combined their pictures and texts. Eugene Smith, Duane Michals, and Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) began writing after securing reputations as photographers. Most preferred presenting pictures in self-designed books, not museum or gallery exhibitions, which they deemed esoteric and inaccessible, and reviews unfairly influential.
Allusive photographic book titles appeared. Baldessari accompanied scenes in Ingres and Other Parables (1971) with an imaginative prose paragraph, but Close-Cropped Tales (1981) lacked words. Captions for single pictures—traditionally minimal—needed interpretation; Lyle Bongé's Hokusai's Wave Winding up (1980) portrayed an asphalt road. Diane Arbus pioneered handwritten captions, sometimes with contextual material, evoking meanings usually associated with literature. Letters and words—usually road and wall signs—had long attracted Cartier-Bresson, Alvarez Bravo, Evans, and Siskind. Now phrases, epigrams, aphorisms, associative word chains, even whole paragraphs, appeared in pictures. Most revolutionary were ‘stories’, with or without words. Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), and Louise Lawler (b. 1947) signed a reproduction of an Alberto Moravia short story, used as a magazine centrefold; Levine elsewhere appropriated literary passages, sometimes unattributed. Ralph Meatyard, drawing on repetitive content from Gertrude Stein and Flannery O'Connor, compelled viewers to interpret The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (1974). Baldessari used traditional literary forms—the allegory, parable, fable, and fairy tale—to deepen conceptual photographs. Michals increasingly provided verbal guides to his philosophies, first with provocatively titled books, then with handwritten linking texts. Such practices hardly made photographs literary but provided a self-consciously innovative alliance with language and, by extension, literature.
Some writers returned the compliment, though more conventionally and sporadically. The doubly gifted tradition was continued by Wright and Thomas Merton (in their last years) and by Morris, Jonathan Williams, Allan Ginsberg, John Howard Griffin, Julio Cortazar, Bruce Chatwin, Jerzy Kosinski, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Michael Ondaatje, and Michel Tournier. But few illustrated their own works.
Photographers had long acknowledged literary influences—particularly of Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Whitman, Joyce, Pound, and Williams. Now writers, especially poets, found inspiration from photographs: from books (Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney), popular magazines (Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop), and newspapers (Denise Levertov, Kenneth Pitchford). Others addressed specific pictures such as Howard on Nadar's, Cocteau on Clergue's, and John Logan on Siskind's. Album pictures still stimulated meditation (Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Charles Wright, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Creeley). Some poets borrowed allusive diction or fresh imagery; Adrienne Rich did both in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963). Novelists continued utilizing real or imagined photographs (Nabokov, Grass, Kosinski); a few explored the lives of significant photographers (Ondaatje, Bellocq; Richard Powers, Sander). Many feminist writers (Cynthia Ozick, Rosellen Brown) featured photographer-heroines, acknowledging the medium's open, inclusive character.
By the millennium, enduring photographs, like enduring books, were regarded as complex mirrors of society, not transparent windows. Both media faced challenges posed by digitization. Meanwhile publishers are reprinting landmark works and collaborations, while issuing collections of writers' photographs, literary picture books, and even scholarly studies of literary and photographic interactions. All recognize that photography's achievements—like literature's—are essential to understanding civilization since 1839.
— Jane M. Rabb
Bibliography
- Rabb, J. M. (ed.), Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840-1990 (1995)
