Fixing the image: The alliance between photography and poetry in America, 1900-1940
Description
Current discourse on photography turns, invariably, on questions of the camera's social, political, and aesthetic influence---does this new medium serve or subvert the status quo, and what power does it exert over other representational practices? Despite the recent publication of several full-length studies exploring the influence of photography on fiction, this is the first critical examination of the relationship between modern photography and modern American poetry, whose similarities have been noted frequently by practitioners of both arts Part One looks at the historical and theoretical similarities between poetry and photography in America from 1900 to the late 1920's. It examines how the photographers and poets who crafted American Modernism (namely, Pound, Stieglitz, Weston, Williams, Stevens, and Moore) forged a radical and complementary vision which helped push America to the forefront of the modern linguistic and visual arts Part Two extends the analysis through the early years of the Great Depression. Here I use Susan Sontag's assertion that 'Photography [is] a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power' as a framework to discuss the changing aesthetic and political landscape against the backdrop of the poems of Hart Crane and the final photographs of Alfred Stieglitz. Part Three continues with an examination of the 'witness culture' of the mid- to late-1930's and a critical analysis of Walker Evans's documentary photographs alongside the proletarian prose-poetry of James Agee in the defining 'document' of the Depression era, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Part Four explores in detail the work of four successful women poets and photographers of the 1920's and '30's (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Marianne Moore). Drawing on what feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have coined 'strategies of female-female impersonation' (the deliberate construction of stereotypical 'masks' behind which women artists of the period might work with relative autonomy), I examine how each was able, despite the limiting gaze of a patriarchal cultural and critical establishment, to inscribe her name on the 'blank page' of the New On the whole, this analysis explores the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic forces which helped to forge an alliance between photography and poetry during the high modernist period in America---an alliance which persists to this day. It examines the relation between still photographs and printed words in light of classical oppositions between image and word, between art and the body, articulated by contemporary cultural, semiotic, and feminist critics, and in the belief that understanding this relationship can help us perceive how art grows out of experience and how it transposes history's 'decisive moments' into forms which continue to be haunted, empowered, and sometimes subverted by them