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

Understanding the vexed and varied relationship between literary production and early photography depends, in part, upon accounting for the fluidity of the technologies and practices that existed under the broad name of photography. Owen Clayton’s Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 does this, becoming a valuable addition to investigations of the relationship between the two arts in the formative time of an emerging visual culture. Twenty years on from Jane M. Rabb’s anthology Literature and Photography: Interactions, 1840–1990, Clayton examines five British and American writers—Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, W. D. Howells, and Jack London—from the extended time period of “multiple photographies,” arguing that these writers’ engagement with photography in their literary production led them to anticipate modernist questions of representation. They do this in different ways, of course, but collectively offer Clayton a way to illustrate that photography of the time was not one, but many things, a point useful to the present digital reality and what he sees as our dangerous propensity to read current media in overly simplistic or essentialist ways. Clayton’s is an energetic, jargon-free, well-written work.

Clayton begins with a useful technological history of his terrain, from daguerreotypy to the rise of American narrative cinema, taking pains to foreground his discussion in the particulars of material transformation— photogenic drawings, heliotype and calotype, wet and dry collodion, gelatin and early film—as well as the experiences of how viewers received such technologies and products, forms which were hypermediated as the art evolved. The essential tension here is that Clayton argues for a rethinking of photography towards a more reflexive project amid a series of different media, rather than approaching photography via historians’ mostly unified interpretation of the form and the belief in realism as photography’s dominant ideology. His first step is to recover Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as an important early example of employing hybrid photographies (daguerreotype engravings) that embraces both the realistic and the picturesque as a vehicle for illustrating the lives of the urban poor. Mayhew eventually moves away from photography once a new technology wielded by street practitioners challenges his own sense of photography as a scientific tool. More interestingly, Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary formulations of the divided self—particularly the fracturing of the modern bourgeois male—were directly informed by the author’s encounters with the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and the composite portraiture of Francis Galton. In attendance in San Francisco when Muybridge first displayed his zoopraxiscope, Stevenson was witness to one of the demarcation lines of the modern world, a moment where time and space were reconfigured via the moving image. The theme of human duality and the fear of “monstrous composites,” exemplified by Galton’s composite portraits, as well as the cultural fear of noxious chemicals and the seclusion of the darkroom, are influences in the emergence of savagery from Dr. Jekyll, whose cabinet is similar to a photographic darkroom. For Clayton, Hyde is a manifestation of the fears surrounding photography, particularly the anxieties about “men who lock themselves in dark rooms to play with chemicals.” Clayton pairs his discussion of Stevenson’s complication of bourgeois identity—and the accompanying homosexual subtext—with a reading of Amy Levy’s 1888 novel The Romance of a Shop, about four sisters who open a photo studio. Shop offers an exploration of, at least in part, the performativity of gender as well as its limits, a glimpse of the repressive power of compulsive heterosexuality, and an authorial retreat, not unlike Mayhew, from the possibilities of photography and onto safer ground.

Howells, using photography to fight literary romance, is seen as updating Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist Holgrave in the character of Bartley Hubbard, and a modern practice that is governed by posing and insincerity. For Clayton, Howells’ London Films (1905) leads the author to a new relationship with photography and a radical if brief embrace of more subjective...