The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After by Joseph R. Millichap (review)

In The Language of Vision, Joseph Millichap sets out "to analyze and interpret the complementary languages and visions of photography and literature in the South … from the 1930s forward" by "centering on a half dozen major writers and their finest texts through close readings both verbal and visual" (xiii). He provides a useful introductory survey of photographic tropes as these appear in the work of six canonical southern US writers: James Agee, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Natasha Trethewey. Chapter 1 provides historical context concerning the nexus of photography and literature in the South, with almost inevitable references along the way to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography. Of far greater use to Millichap, however, is Katherine Henninger's groundbreaking 2007 Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing, in which she draws on Benedict Anderson's writings on nationhood to construct a specifically Southern intermedial culture. I was surprised that Millichap makes no mention in this first chapter (or in proceeding chapters) of the vast and fascinating scholarship concerning the intersection of photography and literature beyond Henninger's, most of which examines many of the same texts as his own study: Michael North's Camera Works (2005), Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness (2008), Jeff Allred's American Modernism and Depression Documentary (2005), and Joseph B. Entin's Sensational Modernism (2012), to name only a handful of book-length studies that focus on American literature. A second, equally striking absence from Millichap's study is that of any photographs themselves; this "strange" absence is explained, he writes, by the difficult, costly, and "time-consuming" activity of acquiring permissions and high-resolution images (xiv).

Chapter 2 foregrounds Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Because Millichap effectively dismisses recent scholarship on this canonical text as "tendentious and ultimately pointless" (138), it is difficult to gauge just where his reading might sit in relation to current debates about this text or the scholarship around intermediality. Nonetheless, this chapter usefully reminds us of the mechanics of Agee and Evans's production of this complex text—and, too, of the important issues and practices it raises: collaboration, ekphrasis, agency, and the relationship between modernism and realism. Millichap's chapter on Faulkner focuses on several lesser-studied works of the Faulkner canon, such as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Flags in the Dust, Pylon, and "The Leg." Perhaps most interesting is Millichap's unraveling of the differences between the two versions of Sanctuary, which comes down to, he argues, their deployment of photography: "several intriguing photographic tropes from the first version … were excised in the published novel" (50). This, Millichap argues, suggests "not just Faulkner's earlier connections with literary realism but his concern for social contexts that would reappear in his fiction as the Depression years unfolded." Like Faulkner, Warren (the subject of chapter 4) "never created a text illustrated by actual photographs" (67). Rather, "documentary visual art in the Depression era opened the emerging writer's imagination to the power of the real inherent in the photograph to revise subjective perceptions of personal, social, and cultural realities." In his survey of such an imagination at work across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Millichap begins to shift the framing of Warren's output from "the history and literature of the Civil War and Civil Rights eras" to "the interest in photography [he] shared with other Southern authors in the 1930s and 1940s[, which] may be attributed to the pervasive power of photography and film as graphic and popular art during these decades" (67–68).

In his chapter on Welty, Millichap notes that there are "almost as many examples of photographs in her prose as of verbal texts in her pictures" (92), the implications of which seem to be that it is extremely difficult—and perhaps futile—to...