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Biography 23.3 (2000) 563-565



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Timothy Dow Adams. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. 298 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2513-1, $49.95 cloth; ISBN 0-8078-4792-5, $22.50.

This is a study of ten autobiographers who make use of photography in their writings. The strength of Adams' book is that he brings out the immensely varied ways that word can be combined with image; that is also its weakness, in that so much variety makes it difficult to discern a coherent thesis. Part One of Light Writing has a rather dismaying sub-title: "Autobiographies with Few or No Photographs." The section deals mainly with ekphrasis, the description of art objects in prose--here family photographs, which may be reproduced or just used as an inspiration for memory. Paul Auster, in The Invention of Solitude, structures his memoir around the task of sorting through family photographs after his father has died, though only two are reproduced in his book. All the writers in this section (the others are Maxine Hong Kingston and the sisters Sheila and Sandra Ortiz Taylor) are trying to take a relatively commonplace article--the family album--and transform it into literary art.

For the writer of autobiographical prose, it may often be easier not to include photographs, for the same reason that movie versions of novels are frequently disappointing. Such autobiographies then deal with family photographs as psychological events: pictures that link different countries or generations, that confirm identities, that disappear through neglect or when family albums are deliberately mutilated. Events of this kind are difficult to analyze because there are billions of them, and each one different: since the introduction of the Kodak Brownie in 1900, photography has been the true mass art. Adams' theme becomes something like "the meal" or "the journey" in autobiography--subjects where one is easily overwhelmed by the excess of available evidence.

Adams' second section, on "Autobiographies that Combine Words and Photographs," starts to come to a better focus. In their memoirs N. Scott Momaday, and Michael and Christopher Ondaatje use actual family photographs to help trace the formation of their hybrid identities. But Adams veers off from his main subject in considering two other books by Michael Ondaatje: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter. These are not autobiographies, but personal works that happen to exploit photography as a metaphor and as a postmodern means of disrupting prose narratives. Reynolds Price, the other writer considered in this section, argues for a more direct use of photographs, as supplements to text: "The best photographs . . . reach us with an instant indelible force that no prose genius has yet mastered" (144). In his memoir Clear Pictures, Price [End Page 563] uses actual family pictures as aids to meditation, creating a richness of effect that neither picture nor prose could achieve in isolation.

Adams' third section, "Autobiographies by Photographers," is the most successful, because it strikes the best balance between the two media. Eudora Welty, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston all have dual talents. Welty and Morris are significant, if minor photographers, and Weston was a great photographer who, in his journals, gave a classic account of the photographer's life. Even here, though, a true fusion of the two arts proves elusive. Eudora Welty photographed mainly in the thirties, when she worked for the Farm Security Administration. She has wanted to keep her two careers distinct because--unlike many later postmodernists--she believes that each medium has its separate sphere. When asked if any of her stories were based on her photographs, she replied: "No. The memory is far better. Personal experience casts its essential light on it" (174). For Welty, then, the mind's eye is always superior to the glass eye of the camera. Wright Morris, on the other hand, believes that photography's great advantage is its dependence on the real: "Thanks to [photography] we do not see more than is there. Not to see more than is there, we learn from photographs, is...

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