On Writing with Photography

Introduction

Introduction KAREN BECKMAN AND LILIANE WEISSBERG What does it mean to“write with photography”? In what variety of contexts does this long-standing but ever-evolving collaboration take place? What kinds of material support has it required or generated over the course of its now-long history, and what difference do these locations and materials make not only to how we understand the nature of the interaction between writing and photography, but also to how this interaction mediates the world? These are the central questions that preoccupy the authors gathered together here.Though this volume is obviously not the first to have considered the important relationship between writing and photography, On Writing with Photography aims to energize the existing conversation in a number of ways. First, at a moment when critical studies of photography repeatedly focus on the digital turn and the way this technological shift affects our theorization of contemporary photographic practices, this volume considers the recent explosion of interactions between writing and photography in relation to the history of such interactions over more than a century. Second, though existing critical discussions of the interaction between writing and photography have tended to focus on texts that easily fall into the category of literature, primarily fiction or autobiography, this volume takes a much broader view of what writing might mean, and in doing so, it makes room for different media, genres, registers, and practices that have hitherto been somewhat overlooked. Children’s books, photo-essays, films, diaries, practical training manuals, postcards, photojournalism , and art installations—these are just some of the little-analyzed ix x Introduction areas of interaction between writing and photography that we hope this volume brings to light in order to generate new directions for research and thought. Similarly, though existing studies have tended to privilege specific geographic regions,most prominently France,Germany,and Great Britain, when considering how writing and photography interact, a focus that in part reflects the location of some key (and mostly male) figures and movements in this conversation (including Lewis Carroll, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, André Breton, Dada, and surrealism), we have tried to solicit essays that extend existing conversations about these more familiar figures as well as explore the interaction between writing and photography through less familiar works in order to engage different kinds of authors and spaces. This expansion of both site and genre in turn invokes the involvement of readers and audiences that differ from either the literary reader or the museum visitor, highlighting the importance of, for example, children, women, workers, and indigenous people as key players in the evolution of the interaction between text and photograph. On Writing with Photography builds on and is inspired by numerous studies that have addressed how photography has shaped the literary text, and, more occasionally, how the literary text has in turn shaped photography , over the course of the medium’s development. Before elaborating on the particular interventions of this volume, we want first to highlight some of the key voices shaping our current understanding of the complex dance between writing and photography. Nancy Armstrong, Daniel Novak, and Jennifer Green-Lewis have all helped us to understand how photography has shaped nineteenth-century writing, mainly with reference to realist fiction .Armstrong, for example, emphasizes the rise of pictorial thinking and mass visuality in the Victorian novel, while Novak reveals how photography marks the bodies of characters in nineteenth-century fiction, as when he notes the way that Mrs. Monarch, an artist’s model in Henry James’s short story“The Real Thing” (), seems to have physically internalized something of photography, being “only able to reproduce herself consistently and mechanically as the same subject.”1 Moving into the twentieth century, Michael North argues not only that modern technologies made new sensory experiences available, inspiring writers, photographers, and Introduction xi filmmakers, but also that the theoretical apparatus we use to discuss the text–photography relationship today has its roots almost exclusively in modernist and postmodernist practices. Addressing one of photography’s most important theorists, Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History () illuminates the extent to which Walter Benjamin’s conception of history would be literally unthinkable without the language of photography. In the art historical context, Rosalind Krauss demonstrates that surrealist and Dadaist photographic experiments must be thought of as a new mode of...