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Focuses on the intersections between text and photography in the twentieth-century American photo-text Ranging from documentary studies in the 1930s to post-war examinations of the American landscape, urban and rural, from Dorothea Lange's photographs of dispossessed migrants in American Exodus (1939), Weegee's small-time hoodlums on the streets of New York in Naked City (1945), to Robert Frank's Cold War citizens, this survey of the photo-text constitutes an invaluable entry into how we read the politics of twentieth-century American photography. In looking specifically at books designed as collaborative efforts, it establishes the photo-text as a genre related to and yet distinct from other documentary efforts. Key Features: - Explores through a series of case studies some of the seminal photo-texts of the 1930s, 40s and 50s from documentary realism of the Depression years to post-war studies of the American landscape. - Examines photo-texts by Doris Ulmann, Walker Evans, James Agee, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, Wright Morris, Paul Strand, Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank. - Enables students and scholars of both American photography and literature to rethink the intersections between writing and photography in political as well as aesthetic terms. Caroline Blinder is Reader in American Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The American Phototext
Part I: The 1930s1. Portraiture as Place: From Pictorialism to Modernism
Doris Ulman and Julia Peterkin's
Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933)
2. Articulating the Depression: Two Contesting Visions
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's
American Exodus (1939) and Margaret Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell's
You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
3. Establishing A photographic Vernacular
Walker Evans's
American Photographs (1938)
Part II: The 1940s
4.
'A Book for All that': Modernism as Documentary Practice
James Agee and Walker Evans's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
5. The American Heartland: Interrogating a Post-War Pastoral
Wright Morris's
The Inhabitants (1945) and
The Home Place (1948)
6. 'Their First Murder': Hardboiled Captions and Flashgun Aesthetics
Weegee's
Naked City (1945)
Part III: The 1950s7. An American Alphabet: Writing Democracy in New England Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall's
Time In New England (1950)
8. Back at Home: Neighborhood and Community in the 1950s
Langston Hughes and Ray DeCarava's
Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)
9. 'On The Road': The Photographer as Outsider
Jack Kerouac's Introduction to Robert Frank's
The Americans (1959)
Conclusion
Index
About the author
Caroline Blinder is Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blinder has written extensively on the intersections between photography and text, starting with Henry Miller's work on Brassaï in her first book,
A Self-Made Surrealist: Henry Miller (1999) and since then in book chapters and articles on amongst others, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Weegee, Robert Frank, and recently Richard Misrach. She teaches American Literature, Film, and Culture at Goldsmiths University. London.
Summary
An Introduction focusing on the intersections between text and photography in the 20th Century American Photo-Text 1930-1960.
