Jack London, Photographer (review)

While many readers recognize Jack London as an accomplished and prolific author, very few are aware of his skills as a photographer, one who captured some 12,000 photographs in his lifetime. When considered in terms of his full canon, such a discovery joins together his humanitarian, journalistic, and philosophical pursuits. In Jack London, Photographer, Reesman, Hodson, and Adam offer a rich and engaging text, which not only introduces London's photographs—many for the first time—but, more importantly, contextualizes the photographs in terms of London's larger body of work. The text is a valuable contribution to London studies in that it represents a part of his oeuvre that has long been overlooked but that opens new possibilities for understanding the author's work—possibilities which challenge some long-standing classifications. By publishing the photographs, the authors call attention to the extent to which London was at the forefront of photojournalism and mass culture, underscoring the need for literary and cultural scholars and historians to pursue future studies in this neglected body of work.

The book is divided into an introduction and six chapters, each of which weds London's major contributions with his collection of photographs. In the Introduction, for example, the authors contextualize London's photographs in terms of the era's emergent fascination with both the tools of photography, particularly the portable camera, and with the period's desire to showcase social and cultural issues. The Introduction compellingly sets London's photography into conversation with the work of other photojournalists, such as Samuel Bourne, Felice Beato, and Francis Frith, noting at the same time the extent to which London charts a course different from these colonialist photographers insofar as London's work does not objectify its subjects (therefore legitimizing the oppression of indigenous persons) nor does it necessarily foreground the photographer-as-adventurer. The authors make a strong case that London's understanding of place, history, and context—all of which manifest themselves in the selection of his photographic subjects, his placement of the lens, and the ways in which he imagines the subjects in communion with him—testify to his seriousness as an artist and cultural critic. The authors also place London's work in terms of the broader anthropological context, aligning his approach with Franz Boas' work, a connection which has yet to be fully explored by London critics. This context offers readers, then, an opportunity to consider the ways in which London "rarely diminishes his subjects.… [I]n his photographs of people struggling to confront poverty, war, natural disasters, disease, and other hardships, London documents people as history."

To this end, Chapter 1 addresses the photographs that constitute his The People of the Abyss. Reesman, Hodson, and Adam argue that while his text might be compared with Riis's How the Other Half Lives, such a comparison rings hollow because Riis's treatment of the urban poor reinforced rather than critiqued class tensions and prejudices. In other words, Riis's placement of the lens did little or nothing to alter the ways in which this under-class had become objectified. By contrast, in Jack London's treatment of the impoverished of London, England, each picture is captioned with his desire to understand the circumstances that brought the subject to this devastating point. In his photograph of a middle-aged homeless woman, for example, his composition strategy—as manifested by his placement of the camera lens for the shot—along with his description of her circumstances—are such where he imagines himself in her place, a place where this moment of peace is the only one she presumably possesses in an environment in which she is besieged by conditions that would negate her existence.

London's sensitivity to marginalized persons becomes clearer with the photographs in Chapter 2, which chronicle his journalistic work during the Russo-Japanese War. London's recognition of the War's devastating effects manifests itself in his photographs of refugees. In his...