Narrative Resolution: Photography in Adolescent Literature

Introduction

Martha Banta's Imaging American Women is an exhaustive treatise on the power of the image to affect cultural consciousness in which she demonstrates that "images of American women were created as ideas, not found" between 1876 and 1918 (xxxi, emphasis Banta's). My focus is neither on cultural history during the Progressive era nor on images of women; rather, I wish to concentrate on an assumption implicit in Banta's argument: creating an image has a two-fold empowering ability because the power of both the creator and of the image itself shifts in the process of calling the image to other people's attention. This process of empowerment seems to have a particularly dramatic effect when the image is created through photography, in part because photography provides even the artistically challenged (like me) the power of creating an image, in part because photographs convey an illusion of mimesis, in part because of "the photograph's perceived transparency and universal comprehensibility" (Hirsch 51), in part because the captured image carries with it the illusion of having stopped time momentarily.

Banta explicitly acknowledges the camera as a tool of empowerment in a series of pictures she supplies for the reader. The photos are of her mother, Irma Purman, taken while she was coming of age by the photographer Merle Smith. The final picture in the book is of Irma Purman holding a camera:

But what is nice about this photograph is that—although it is only one of the scores of occasions she faced a camera once she had been classified as the Town Beauty by the age of sixteen— she at last, at the age of twenty-four, picks up her own camera and aims it directly at the man with the camera. . . . Reciprocal energy is released through this double image of perception and thought, action and counteraction. It is a small statement she makes here, and a quiet one, but her steady gaze says clearly enough, "Look, I can do it too!"

(700)

In Banta's economy, her mother's possession of a camera symbolizes her maturity; while Purman was an adolescent, she was the object of photography, but now that she is an adult, she can be a photographing subject. The "reciprocal energy" Banta describes in this photograph is a significant function of the camera because the process of photography calls into question the agency of both the photographer and the photographed image.

For that matter, the same self-conscious image of agency occurs in the opening credits of Arthur, the popular PBS program for preschoolers based on Marc Brown's books. While Ziggy Marly sings a snappy song about empowerment that begins, "Every day / When you're walking down the street / Everybody that you meet / Has an original point of view," Arthur drives his family crazy taking pictures of them. They finally retaliate; as he tries to take a group picture of his parents, his grandparents, and his sisters, they all pull cameras out of their pockets and snap pictures of him. The camera empowers Arthur, and it also affords his family a way to communicate to him; all of them gain something by communicating through the language of photographs.

The metaphor of the camera bestowing on the photographer a sense of empowerment based on the communicative abilities of photographs occurs often in literature. Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm (1982), Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter (1987), Ann Beattie's Picturing Will (1989), Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1990), and Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), for example, are novels that depict women developing their own sense of personal power through photography. Since women's literature shares with adolescent literature a concern for people who initially feel disempowered but grow into an increased awareness of what exactly agency entails, it seems natural that the metaphor of the camera recurs as often in adolescent literature as it does in women's literature. Four novels about adolescents or preadolescents that demonstrate the protagonist employing photography as a metaphorical representation for achieving agency include Lois Lowry's A Summer to...