On Writing with Photography

Chapter 7: Playing Doll

Telling Pictures In , Dare Wright published her first book, a children’s story, The Lonely Doll. The book brings together text with photographs Wright had taken, and it had an immediate commercial success. Wright wrote other picture books that followed the life and adventures of the lonely doll, Edith, and published Holiday for Edith and the Bears in , The Doll and the Kitten in , and Edith and Mr. Bear in . Indeed, by  Wright had published nineteen books that could be included in the“Lonely Doll” series or that were similar text-and-photograph children’s books.1 At the time of The Lonely Doll’s publication,Wright was forty-two years old, unmarried, and had already pursued a career as a model and fashion photographer. She had appeared in  and  sparsely clothed for Maidenform underwear in the advertisement series,“I dreamed I had . . . in my maidenform bra” (Figure .).2 She was even featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.3 In the following years, Wright was hired as a photographer for Good Housekeeping and other journals.The Maidenform bra advertisement introduced Wright as the prospective“film actress Sally Starr,” who dreamed of the big screen, and Wright herself later compared the work on her first book with that on a film script:“You need a story line, a shooting script, and a wardrobe department.”4 Wright’s first book was initially titled“Spring Fever,” and it placed her doll, Edith, in the foreground. In creating the book, Wright viewed story writing, picture taking, picture  7 Playing Doll LILIANE WEISSBERG Bodies that experience violence are simply dolls. —Christian Jankowski, Lycan Theorized Figure 7.1. Dare Wright, modeling for Maidenform, 1950–51. Playing Doll  selecting, and the choice of costumes for the doll as equally important, and while these activities were similar to working on a film,it was perhaps a speci fic kind of film: an already antiquated black-and-white oeuvre. Wright’s use of text, too, inspires comparison to the intertitles in silent movies. From the beginning,Wright’s stories tried to create the look of film. She reproduced her images in various formats and placed them creatively on the page. They appeared above, under, and next to the text, and sometimes without any text whatsoever. Photographs seem to disrupt the format of the individual page and at times were spread across a double page. The overall effect was one of movement. Pictures were printed in sequences that seem to set them into motion, and each individual image gained a different meaning and weight from the next. The rhythmic style simulated a variation of time through the succession of images and text, and even independent from the text,the pictures seem to produce a narrative plot on their own (Figure .). Here, however, a paradox emerges. It was precisely a dearth of movement and an absence of any kind of action that was the starting point for The Lonely Doll and Edith’s story. The doll finds herself at home alone and feels bored. In this context, however, boredom does not simply stem from a lack of activity. Edith bears a loneliness that seems to lie deeply buried within her and is never quite explained. At the beginning of the story the doll has neither family nor friends, yet we never learn how this situation came to be.She is simply named the“Lonely Doll”; and while the reader gets to know her as“Edith”or simply“Edie,”she does not seem to have an owner or—as it is central to a child’s perception of the doll—any parents. Thus, she lives alone in a brownstone furnished according to upper-middle-class standards, a one-family home that appears to be located in New York. In a city of apartment buildings, such a domicile is in no way common. Edie’s loneliness is stated but just as suddenly and abruptly ended. Two teddy bears visit her. Initially they are unknown to her, but they are ready to move into her building and become her surrogate family. The larger bear assumes the position of father and is politely named “Mr. Bear.” The smaller,“Little Bear,”becomes a kind of younger brother who wants to play with the doll and seduces her to undertake adventures.There are no female family members here, and none appear in the other books either. Mr. Bear Figure 7.2. Dare Wright...