Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton (review)

This book discusses a variety of interactions between photography and literature in the transitory period of the medium between 1850 and 1915. Building on terminology established by Daniel Novak and John Tagg, Owen Clayton chooses the term “photographies,” which stresses the fact that during the early days of the photographic medium, instead of one dominant process, there existed an array of coexisting techniques and photographic methods. As the author explains in his Introduction, the main goal of his work is to establish how various literary uses of photography reflect upon the heterogeneity of the medium itself and how they portray the changes that photography was undergoing.

Chapter One further explores the notion of the term “photographies” and features Clayton’s abbreviated history of the medium’s development, which includes notions of both its simultaneity and technological multiplicity. Chapter Two discusses Henry Mayhew’s work titled London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62), in which a popular English journalist portrays urban workers and underprivileged classes of his time. Clayton notices that while Mayhew’s work has already been well researched, the critiques never paid enough attention to the way it utilizes photographic images. According to Clayton, Mayhew’s choice of the daguerreotype-engraving mixed process over the more modern collodion technique is purposeful. The chapter presents how, by staging the images and then selectively engraving them, Mayhew achieves his goal to create an illusion of objectivity, while at the same time establishing his position of control and succeeding in generating specific emotions among his readers.

In Chapter Three, Clayton presents how photography is employed in the creation of selfhoods in late nineteenth-century fiction. While discussing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Clayton argues that Stevenson uses photography as a metaphor for the psychotic effect of modernity. The novel itself reflects the writer’s fascination with several photographic techniques, especially those that allow multiple images to be shown simultaneously (zoopraxiscope) and those that combine multiple exposures of the same image (composite photography). On the other hand, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) introduces photography as a gender-model construction tool. According to Clayton, Levy uses photography to display how gender is constructed not through the portrayal of characters, but rather through their performance. This is illustrated by the novel, which presents the story of four sisters engaged in (an unusual for their time) pursuit of the photographic business, in the form of a gender performativity discourse in relation to photography.

Chapter Four is dedicated to the analysis of William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches (1871). Clayton concentrates his attention on relationships between the notions of work, literature, and photography expressed in Howells’s work. For example, according to the author, Howells builds one of his reoccurring characters, Bartley Hubbard, as a polemic to Hawthorne’s Holgrave, and respective characters illustrate both authors’ notions of the nature of work. In addition, Clayton argues, in his novel titled A Modern Instance (1882), the motif of photographic portraiture is used as a representation of the self-destructive impulses of the protagonist.

Chapter Five explores the interconnections between literary works by Jack London and both photography and early cinema. The analysis of London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), presents how London uses a variety of photographic techniques, including composite method, in order to create socially and politically meaningful images. As it is shown in the chapter, the image manipulation allows the writer to achieve the rhetorical effect, but consequently puts his work under scrutiny for the lack of realism. Later in the chapter, Clayton presents the ways London’s photographs adopt numerous cinematic tropes, but also how the changing cinema reflects itself in his late fiction, including the Abysmal Brute (1911) and The Valley of the Moon (1913).

In the Afterward the author talks about nostalgia for “photographies,” which at the end of the twentieth century takes a form of a revival of interest in old...