On Writing with Photography ed. by Karen Beckman, Liliane Weissberg (review)

Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg’s edited collection On Writing with Photography sets out “to offer a reminder that writing with photographs constitutes not a minor subset of literary practice, but rather a foundational aspect of the modern reading experience” (xiii). With a wide range of authors from across the humanities, the book provides insights into a visual and textual interplay that pushes beyond concerns with medium specificity. In fact, what most of the authors offer is the analysis of photography as it intersects with other media—that is, photography as an intermedial aesthetic that both amplifies and constructively distorts presumptions about representation. The essays draw from writers such as W. G. Sebald, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Nancy Armstrong, and Eduardo Cadava, but they ultimately expand this scholarship across literary registers and extend its implications across languages, regions, and history. Whether Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of postmemory in Eva Hoffman and Art Spiegelman, Roderick Coover’s reflections on John Wesley Powell’s mapping of the Colorado River, or Xiaojue Wang’s analysis of photography in Zhang Ailing and Lu Xun, the volume links situated case studies with broader claims about photography and mediation. “To write with photography,” the editors suggest in the opening pages, “is to acknowledge the difficulty of accessing the real, of reading or writing history responsibly or truthfully, as well as the necessity of attempting to do so in spite of the seeming impossibility of the task” (xv).

The volume provides numerous points of entry for readers interested in media studies, literary theory, and particular literary traditions, with references to figures such as Claude McKay, Guy Debord, Werner Graeff, Man Ray, Roland Barthes, Don DeLillo, and Dare Wright, to name just a few. The contributors all share in understanding writing in its broadest sense, dealing with everything from essays, training manuals, and diaries, to films, children’s books, and photojournalism. They collectively engage photography in its manifold interactions with cinema, poetry, postcards, dolls, novels, and mapping. In the introduction to the volume, the editors outline the broad scope and direction of the collected essays with an emphasis on the common set of concerns regarding representation, indexicality, and intermediation. The opening remarks first gesture to a previous generation of writers linking literature and photography and, second, explain how the essays collected constitute a new set of questions, concerns, and pathways for research. This scholarly mapping makes the introduction alone valuable to anyone interested in understanding both prior scholarship and new trajectories in the field.

With specific essays approaching gender, memory, geography, phenomenology, and war, the volume overall is united by a common attention to intermedial aesthetics and the indexical limits of photography. Some of the essays, such as Stuart Burrows’s analysis of James Agee, reflect on these matters explicitly. “The difference between language and photography,” Burrows writes, “is that writing can reflect on its failures, while the camera must be necessarily blind to them” (126). Other essays take writing and photography in other directions, such as Leah Rosenberg’s contribution, which places Claude McKay’s poetry alongside tourist photographs and postcards from Jamaica. Where both Burrows and Rosenberg deal with the interplay of literature and photography, Daniel Magilow explores Werner Graeff ’s 1929 Here Comes the New Photographer! and New Vision as experiments in a language of images—a moment that he describes as photography’s linguistic turn. In Graeff ’s work, Magilow tells us, “photographs became the text by adopting the functions of written and spoken language” (96).

The blurring of the boundaries between the textual and the visual, the analysis of language across media, and the gesture to the limits of indexicality are all key engagements that help to make On Writing with Photography of particular relevance for comparatists. First, as comparative literature extends conversations beyond literary traditions and into media studies, the book provides models for scholarship anchored in intermedial aesthetics. Marcy Dinius’s essay on photography in the work of Herman...