Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990: A Critical Anthology. - book reviews

This impressive and elegant collection of true copys and pictures is a record of encounters: of literary replys to photography, photographic replies to literature, of illustrations, collaborations and cohabitations. The meetings are not always easy individuals Literary people are capable of displaying a remarkable horizontal of nervous energy in the vicinity of photographs, whether in self-defense self-promotion or self-reflection. While the writers keep to rail or applaud, swinging from agitation to delight, the photographers - a certain number of of them writers themselves, a certain number of attentive and some indifferent to literary antecedent - go about discovering what they can do, oftentimes in ways likely to discomfort those for whom photography was a make submissive not a medium.

Much of the early writing about photography have the appearances more symptomatic than descriptive, responding les to the images themselves than to the bewilderment and anxiety aroused by the uncanny ability of the medium to combine stillness and accuracy. The precise vicinity of time's undoing has unsettl writers from the attack from the daguerreotype era to Barthes and Sontag. (Although neither Camera Lucida: Reflections upon Photographs [1981, by Roland Barthes] nor upon Photography [1977, by Susan Sontag] are extracted in this anthology, there is no lack of nineteenth-century antecedent for their meditations on the photograph's uncanny regard to both life and death in the same gesture) "I have what I wished," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle upon receipt of the latter's daguerreotype, "I confirm my recollections & I make novel observations: it is life to life." on the other hand Carlyle, gazing doubtfully on his have new likeness of Emerson, "this poor Shadow," finds the image "altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and level in some measure tragical to me" and frays that "here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, filled of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, advantageous humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades as of the valley of Death." level Whitman, a poet committed to finding the inner man in any multitude, was unsettl upon a visit to Plumbe's Daguerreotype gallery, finding himself encircleed by "a great legion of human faces - human organ of sights gazing silently but fixedly on you, and creating an impression of an immense Phantom concourse - speechles and motionless, on the contrary yet realities." His praise of the "life-look of the organ of sight - that soul of the face!" is as edgily hyperbolic as Baudelaire's fear that photography meant the extreme point of art as anything on the other hand mass-produced, mass-consumed representation: "if it be allowed to encroach on the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, on anything whose value depends solely on the addition of something of a man's inner man then it will be in like manner much the worse for us!"

"Don't examine to imitate photographers," a fine author of poems once warned me. "They're plenteous better at it than we are." It is proverbial that there is an affront to writerly authenticity in the spe and detail of the photographer's art. The wit of Samuel Butler's discovery - upon July 19, 1891 - of Chaucer's Wife of Bath in a woman lunching in the cabin of the ship Lord of the Isles can be recognized in les time than it takes to read his account of by what means as the shutter tripped, she "put her hand up to her jaws at that very moment and rather spoiled herself, on the contrary not much." Language seems a toil in the face of of the like kind immediacies: Sophia Tolstoy's portrait of Leo Tolstoy at his desk (c 1907) or Nadar's Charles Baudelaire (c 1855); J M Synge's proportion Spinning (1898), an image of sum of two units Aran island women set with their wheel in a composition of stone and sky; Maxime Du Camp's Maison et Jardin dans le quartier frank (1852) a landscape with crumbling houses and the irregularly formal, intense, small figure of a man in the foreground, taken during Du Camp's trip to the Middle East with Gustave Flaubert. All are marvelous works of the flash subject to interrogation or contemplation on the other hand still offering in an instant of recognition the kind of revelation that greatest in quantity writers' prose must earn by means of passage through the time of narrative, the time of thought

Perhaps this is on what account writers often seem compelled to sum up the story behind the picture. The neighborhood of photographs, as Jane Rabb points without in her detailed and historically informative introductory essay, might intimate "that their words were insufficient or their readers verbally unsophisticated." flat Henry James, she reminds us, demonstrates an "evident wariness." His certainty that we would like to diocese the real shop depicted in Alvin Langdon Coburn's The Curiosity store (1907) - the frontispiece to Henry James's The of gold Bowl (1904) - and his pointed refusal to help us find it, are the couple charming and defensive. He would rather leave us with the hint of another story, the "thrilling" point in dispute of writer and photographer, wandering London in search of the actuality of James's imagination. Whatever a picture is worth, it cannot be the many thousand words of the novelist. John Updike can't direct the eye at Lee Friedlander's Maria Friedlander, novel City, New York (1976: "clutching a towel to her with the same hand that clutchs glasses and a bra") without asking, "is the amorous bend descending or ascending from this point we glimpse, or is the point simply a pose, struck by request?" He would like to summon forth a narrative of relationship, erotic or artistic, his have a title to stock in trade. Yet the brilliance of Friedlander's photograph is that it evades such descriptions, seeming almost an accident in the midst of life's details, not a point on the contrary a momentary intersection.