Photography

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Between the end of the U.S. Civil War and the end of World War I, photography was transformed from a slow, static process of image making by specialists into a mobile, distinct, democratic art form. Although sometimes suspicious of its perceived artistic weaknesses, American writers, taking note of photography's unparalleled realistic qualities and its broad popularity, were influenced by its documentary strengths and often incorporated them into their own literary projects.

TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Two of the most iconic images in 1870s America were Andrew Russell's 1869 photograph of the joining of the rails at Promontory Point, Utah, and Eadweard Muybridge's 1872 image of a horse's four hooves suspended above the ground, which appeared in Scientific American in 1878. The first was commemorative proof that the immense continent had been spanned; the second, achieving for the dimension of time what the first had done for space, isolated and froze a fraction of a second's motion. With a bank of cameras and a rapid shutter, Muybridge (1830–1904) captured what the human eye could not see and prepared the way for moving pictures. In his 1871 poem "Passage to India," Walt Whitman (1819–1892) ecstatically describes the Pacific Railroad overcoming all barriers, a description dependent on the camera's production of images because the poet had not witnessed the events himself. New technologies were shrinking the world and its visual mysteries were increasingly laid bare by evolving photographic practices and the practitioners who took their cameras into the unknown.

The western American landscape was photographically cataloged throughout the 1870s via the government surveys of Ferdinand Hayden, George Wheeler, and John Wesley Powell, with the work of the photographers William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others, detailing for easterners the country's varied geography, elegizing the passing wilderness, and setting the stage for its development. Innovations moved the chemical process of photography from a bulky, wet-plate ordeal in which the latent image had to be developed in the field, to dry-plate image making where the developing could be done elsewhere. The 1880s saw the beginning of a democratic revolution when George Eastman (1854–1932) introduced the first Kodak box camera and flexible roll film, placing picture-taking power in the hands of amateurs and altering forever what would be recorded with the camera. By the 1890s, the halftone process of photographic newspaper reproduction was perfected; in the early 1900s photographs largely replaced drawings in newspapers; and by 1920 the content of tabloid newspapers began to be driven by photographs. Successive formats and technologies moved photography into the modern age, increasing its speed, versatility, applications, and popularity.

As amateur "snapshot" photography was exploding with the introduction of the first inexpensive Kodak Brownie in 1900 and the company's promise "You press the button, we do the rest," serious photographers of the time were representing the American experience with astonishing diversity and power. The New York City newspaper reporter Jacob Riis (1849–1914), combining newly developed flash technology and moral anger at the complex web of forces creating the squalor in the city's Lower East Side tenements, agitated for housing reform, ultimately producing How the Other Half Lives (1890), a book that drew considerable attention and even moved the young Theodore Roosevelt. Like Muybridge, the painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) experimented with motion photography but also employed the camera as a tool and model for his detail-laden paintings. In 1887 he took one of the last photographs of Whitman, portraying him as the "good, gray poet." In 1902 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) initiated the Photo-Secession, breaking away from the Camera Club of New York and championing photography as a complex art form practiced by serious artists, in opposition to the amateur Kodak images flooding the scene. By 1906 Lewis Hine (1874–1940), following Riis, was using the camera as a lever for social reform, working for the National Child Labor Committee to educate Americans about the need for legislation to protect child workers. Hine made use of slide shows to disseminate his message, as did Edward Curtis (1868–1952), who in 1907 embarked on what would prove to be a nearly thirty-year project to document a "vanishing race." Curtis's opulent twenty-volume North American Indian (1907–1930) was sold by subscription mainly to a wealthy eastern audience, and his elegiac images were similar to the painterly pictorialist project of Stieglitz and his followers but owed a great deal as well to conventions of portraiture and ethnography. In the late 1890s and in the first years of the twentieth century, the German émigré Arnold Genthe and the obscure E. J. Bellocq chronicled relatively unknown subcultures, the community of San Francisco's Chinatown and the world of prostitutes in New Orleans, respectively. The year 1905 saw the first extensive use of photographs in National Geographic magazine, bringing global exoticism and an implicit approval of colonialism to increasing numbers of American homes. Photo postcards, including horrific images of lynchings, traveled widely through the U.S. mail, while World War I brought the U.S. government a sharpened sense of the power of the art form as propaganda. Strict government control kept images of trench warfare and dead American soldiers from the public's sight. The artistic project of the pictorialists gradually gave way by 1920 to the aesthetic of "straight photography," which embraced sharp, "objective" images, and the investigation of abstract form, initiated by Paul Strand (1890–1976) and championed by Stieglitz in a break with his earlier pictorialist leanings.

In addition to the published works of Riis and Curtis, notable photographic books published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include Muybridge's Animal Locomotion (1887) and Human Figure in Motion (1901), and the ten-volume Photographic History of the War of the Rebellion (1912), which extended the popular market for Civil War imagery and which had first been successfully presented in Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865). Several photographers were also writers or diarists, including the Hayden geological survey photographer Jackson and Seneca Ray Stoddard, who paired his photography with his own writing to promote the tourist trade in the Adirondacks and to later agitate for the creation of an Adirondack Park. Photography had its own exhibit hall at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, complete with works by Marcus Aurelius Root, author of The Camera and the Pencil (1864), the first published history of the medium by an American. Photographs played an important role as well at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, although it was more commercial and even corporate in nature—there was no separate photographic hall, but patrons could choose from hundreds of approved souvenir photo albums of the event. With the publication of how-to books such as Charles Taylor's Why My Photographs Are Bad (1902), it was evident that the era of the amateur photographer had arrived. Popular camera clubs and photographic societies formed, including salon-like gatherings where serious "art" photographers could find sustenance and purpose in a shared pursuit. In 1902 Stieglitz's Photo-Secession linked the project of serious photography with the broader insurrection of artists in Europe. The same year, Stieglitz opened the 291 Gallery in New York, whose first major exhibition of a hundred photographs met with critical approval when it debuted on 24 November 1905. From 1903 to 1917 Stieglitz published the journal Camera Work, an eclectic celebration and promotion of the avantgarde, photography included. In the journal, Stieglitz championed the work of the photographers Paul Strand, Gertrude Käsebier, and Edward Steichen and in a 1912 issue publicly introduced the work of the writer Gertrude Stein.

LITERARY AFFINITIES

The art and science of photography significantly influenced the style, content, and reception of American literature of the period. The perceived affinities between literary and photographic art became increasingly obvious in the context of a search for authentic artistic representations of life. Many writers embraced photography's verisimilitude, its seeming ability to objectively catalog the details of culture and external character heretofore unrepresented. Whitman, who had reported on the heady days of daguerreotypy, not only lived to be one of the most photographed American authors of the nineteenth century but also incorporated the art form's aesthetic into his oft-revised Leaves of Grass (1855–1892). The poet claimed everything in Leaves was "literally photographed" and pronounced his final version of the book "my definitive carte visite" (photo calling card). Whitman was also adept at using his own photo iconography to promote his celebrity and writing; he projected so many identities of himself that he confessed confusion over which was the "real" poet. Mark Twain (1835–1910), the only nineteenth-century author to be photographed more than Whitman, both damned and praised photography. He called it an eternal lie (1866) but complimented his fellow writer William Dean Howells (1837–1920) in an 1879 letter, saying that whatever Howells writes "leaves a photograph." Twain incorporated photographic situations and references into some of his writings, such as A Tramp Abroad (1880) and King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905), exploring the gulf between appearance and reality and deploying photographic metaphors in the service of his satire. Like Whitman, Twain also extensively managed his own public imagery. Although ultimately ambivalent about the art form's usefulness for literature, Howells worked photographic subjects into his fiction. Photography serves notable functions in A Modern Instance (1882), in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884), and in London Films (1905), in which a writer carries and employs a "mental Kodak." Kate Field published Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings: Taken from Life (1871), whose title is an attempt to capitalize on the reportorial cachet of photography. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane (1871–1900) is indebted to the Civil War imagery of Mathew Brady and others. In a review of the novel, the writer Harold Frederic (1856–1898) compared Crane to Muybridge, and Crane, reviewing Frederic's work in turn, compared the author to a sensitive photographic plate. Howells alluded to photograph-like impartiality in his praise of Frank Norris's McTeague (1899). Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) was hailed for its photo-realism in depicting urban life, and his 1915 novel The "Genius" explores a young artist immersed in a cityscape indebted to Stieglitz's pictorialist images. Dreiser (1871–1945) had taken an interest in the handmade painterly photographs of the Photo-Secession, only to reject that aesthetic in favor of the sharper photojournalistic documentation of Riis and Hine.

Yet there were objections and ambivalence as well as enthusiasm. While literary realism and naturalism were often favorably labeled "photographic" for their attention to detail, the label began to be attached to supposedly mechanical or unimaginative writing. Authors such as Howells and Henry James (1811–1882) were sometimes cast as little more than indiscriminate operators or mechanical recorders lacking artistic ability. For some, literature that appeared to be using the camera's power to record suffered when compared to true art, which was decidedly nonmechanical and could transport the soul. Émile Zola (1840–1902) in "The Experimental Novel" (1880) was compelled to defend the literary naturalists against derisive dismissals that they were "merely photographers." James, who regularly employed the metaphors of lens and point of view in his fiction, in The Aspern Papers (1888) linked photography to other modern conveniences that have "annihilated surprise." Authenticity and the role of the artist as either objective recorder or imaginative creator were core concerns for artists in both visual and literary arts of the time. James explored this problem in the story "The Real Thing" (1893), which concerns the inapplicability of the notion of authenticity where artistic representation and marketability are concerned. Where Zola had advocated that writers practice a photographic attentiveness, James resisted the camera's supposed objectivity and its use as a revolutionary model for writers.

CONFLUENCES OF LITERATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Despite his early ambivalence about photography, James came to value it enough to select Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1936) to illustrate photographically the twenty-four-volume New York edition of his collected works (1907–1909). James extensively advised Coburn on the images that were to begin each volume and even participated enthusiastically in photographic expeditions to London with the photographer to secure appropriate "optical symbols." James undoubtedly saw Coburn's soft images as an evocative art form that complemented but did not compete with his literary works. The author included a tribute to Coburn's work in the preface to The Golden Bowl (1909). Bernhard Tauchnitz had previously used photography as an appropriate illustration and salable feature for literary works, notably in the Leipzig edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun (1860), which remained popular for decades among Americans touring Europe. Each book came with several blank pages, inviting tourist readers to select their own images to include in the book, thus participating in its ongoing construction. In 1890 Houghton Mifflin published a new two-volume edition of The Marble Faun, complete with fifty photogravures.

Most American writers of the period found themselves frequent subjects of the camera, and some practiced photography as well. Bret Harte (1836–1902), who wrote "A Niece of Snapshot Harry's" (1900) and claimed that photography was his "only recreation," was an avid if less than adept amateur who had his own darkroom. Henry Adams learned to take photographs, "dabbling" in the medium because he was unable to draw. Jack London (1876–1916) took and developed his own pictures, illustrating The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Road (1907) with his own images. In 1904 Hearst newspapers published some of his photographs from the Russo-Japanese War.

Stieglitz's advocacy of photography as a serious art form existed within a context where, strategically, photography was practiced and photographs exhibited within the sphere of influence of other artistic forms. Stieglitz sought to encourage a steady confluence of artistic thought and expression, ultimately encouraging many modernist writers, including Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. The poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) embraced the avant-garde theory of vorticism, the belief that at the core of all artistic creations lay a geometric concentration of energy, and he collaborated with Coburn on a series of "vortographs," prismatic photographs that fragmented the subject. Pound and Coburn had a vexed relationship with each other over the vortographs, exhibited in 1917, but the kaleidoscopic images suggested the themes of alienation and fragmentation so central to the modernist literary project. In the same year, the final issue of Camera Work reproduced eleven of Strand's new "straight" photography images, along with an essay, written by the photographer himself, that trumpeted the medium as a pathway to "intense self-realization." Influenced by the modernist painters he had seen at Stieglitz's 291, Strand initiated an investigation of abstract form that would touch many artists across multiple media. Strand saw corollaries to his aspiration to offer honest portrayals of ordinary subjects in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915) and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Strand wrote Anderson (1876–1941) in 1920, saying that Winesburg had enlarged his spirit and given him renewed hope in the artistic fight against the craven materialism of America.