Fifty Key Writers on Photography

Mark Durden, Mark Durden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135117344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

A clear and concise survey of some of the most significant writers on photography who have played a major part in defining and influencing our understanding of the medium. It provides a succinct overview of writing on photography from a diverse range of disciplines and perspectives and examines the shifting perception of the medium over the course of its 170 year history. Key writers discussed include:

• Roland Barthes
• Susan Sontag
• Jacques Derrida
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Geoffrey Batchen

Fully cross-referenced and in an A-Z format, this is an accessible and engaging introductory guide.

James Agee (1909–1955)

Caroline Blinder

James Agee’s reputation as a writer on photography is predominantly based on his long-term collaborative work with the photographer Walker Evans, the result of which, Let us now Praise Famous Men (1941), remains one of the most complex investigations into the ethical implications of documentary practice to come out of the 1930s. As stated in its introduction, the book was meant to take as its subject ‘North American Cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families’ (Agee and Evans 1941: xiv), and yet, couched within its 500-plus pages of prose, poetry and photographs lay also a commentary on and critique of the idea of photography as an undisputed instrument of progress, on photography as a straightforward method of documentation.

While Agee famously decreed ‘the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time’ (Agee and Evans 1941: 11), his observations on the potentially voyeuristic aspects of documentary practice and the ways in which this voyeurism has to be negotiated remain a remarkably prescient rumination on photographic practice, in general. Coming in the wake of both Margaret Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1936) and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus (1939), Let us now Praise Famous Men, was partly constructed as a response to the perceived stereotyping of the South in Bourke White’s photographs of an apparently backwards people. For Agee, such attempts proved the near impossibility of a genuine document of abject poverty that did not in the end demean the subjects portrayed. Rather than a series of case studies, the three families with whom he lived during the summer of 1936 thus became a springboard for an investigation into the philosophical ramifications of documentary representation itself. For Agee, the fact that his subjects, as he put it, ‘exist, in actual being, as you do and as I do’ meant that it was the obligation of the documentary project to render both the emotional and psychological landscape, as well as the reality of the existence of the subjects, in as truthful terms as possible (Agee and Evans 1941: 12).

Agee’s background as a lyricist (his collection of poems Permit Me Voyage was published in 1934) as well as a staff writer for Fortune and, later, Time Magazine, undoubtedly added to the lyrical tone of Let us now Praise Famous Men; but it also – more crucially – allowed him to define Evans’s photography as able to render ‘those individual existences … where each carries in the postures of his body, in his hands, in his face, in the eyes, the signatures of a time and a place in the world’ (Agee 2004: 15). This later comment, from Agee’s introduction to Evans’s photographs of commuters on the New York Subway, Many Are Called, indicates the way in which Agee stresses the individuality of the subjects, making the photograph’s ability to capture the uniqueness of a time and place paramount.

Agee’s writing on Walker Evans’s photography as a way to sanctify human individuality is echoed in his later collaborative work with the New York-based photographer Helen Levitt during the 1940s. Like Evans’s images of the 1930s sharecroppers, Levitt’s photographs of children on the streets of Harlem and Manhattan were, for Agee, clear manifestations of the importance of an ethical documentary perspective, a perspective in which the presence of both the photographer and the subject photographed could co-exist without the stigma of an overtly journalistic agenda. In Levitt’s lyrical portrayal of the movements and play of children, Agee finally found proof of photography’s ability to combine realist representation with an emotive and distinctly lyrical quality. The beauty of Levitt’s ‘ordinary metropolitan soil’, as Agee put it, was that it finally proved without subterfuge the presence of ‘reality in its unmasked vigour and grace’ (Agee 1965: 8). This is another version of the ‘time and a place in the world’ that Agee felt Walker Evans’s subway photos so irrevocably caught in the faces of the passengers photographed (Agee 2004: 14).

In A Way of Seeing, an introduction to Levitt’s first collected book of photographs, posthumously printed in 1965, Agee defines a distinctly American visual vernacular as instrumental in creating this sense of truthfulness, of ‘unmasked vigour and grace’. In 1944 Agee and Levitt collaborated on a short art film, In the Street; a cross between American cinema verité and live photography, the 14-minute black- and-white film was shot by Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt in East Harlem. Silent, save for a piano accompaniment by Arthur Kleiner, the film likewise exemplifies Agee’s concept of the lyrical photograph, ‘filled with movement, fluid and so transient’ it is able to capture the most illuminating moment in which ‘the simplest and most direct way of seeing the everyday world is…the most subjective way in which we ordinarily look around us’ (Agee 1965: 8).

In the Street, among other things, sets out to define the photographic process as also operating in some ways between two genres: photography and film. A devotee of silent movies, Agee used cinema as an entry into a reconsideration of how gestures within photography can be read as a visual language in themselves. In A Way of Seeing, two modes of documentary photography are distinguished: the static and meditative gaze (found in Walker Evans’s photographs, for example) in which ‘the actual is not at all transformed; it is reflected and recorded, within the limits of the camera with all possible accuracy’, and the lyrical and emotional gaze (evident in Levitt’s street photography) in which ‘the most illuminating moment’ is that ‘faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization’ (Agee 1965: 8).

As in the case of Evans, Agee’s impulse was to both universalize and Americanize Levitt. This was not simply because of the unmistakable urbanity of Levitt’s images and the unmistakeable rural quality of Evans’, but because Agee considered their collective ability to capture the sacred in the everyday a decidedly American characteristic. As Agee put it: ‘The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world’ (Agee 1965: 8).

Just as Evans’s photographs of the sharecroppers in Let us now Praise Famous Men were partly about the illuminative potential of a lost pastoral dream during 1930s America, Agee’s desire to use Levitt’s work as proof of the magnetism of street photography also reflects 1940s concerns with environment and social behaviour. The issue is one of community or ‘how we all powerfully inter-depend upon and enhance one another, reverberating like mirrors locked face to face’ (Agee 1965: 8). Always gravitating towards the communal, the vision of togetherness in Levitt’s images allowed Agee to concretize what he had signalled in Let us now Praise Famous Men – namely, the importance of photography as a form of shared intimacy as well as a communicative device. The children in Levitt’s photographs, for instance, rather than being seen as victims of social forces beyond their control, are complex ciphers for an innocence that has as much to do with photography’s ability to capture the purity of an instant as with their actual social circumstances, an ‘innocence, not as the word has come to be misunderstood and debased, but in its full original wildness, fierceness, and instinct for grace and form’ (Agee 1965: 13).

This mix of intimacy and form is what Agee wanted photography to render. It lies in the gestural qualities of Levitt’s work because, more than anything else, they intimate the continuum of lived life, making photography both still and moving collide with something beyond the surface. In the end, the external gesture is also what attaches value to interior life and, for Agee, Levitt’s ability to infer such attachments proves the link between street photography and the lyrical quality he so ardently desired. What Agee recognized was essentially that in order to have relevance, street photography would have to signal its own ability to capture more than simply a place and situation at hand. In effect, by capturing the lyricism of the street and the external world we live in, untold interior regions could also be intimated and explored. Agee’s elevation of photography into something more complex than simply a method of documentation was a crucial step in a longer process of allowing what we now take for granted – namely, the blurring between art and documentary photography, between fiction and reportage. For Agee, photography simply unearthed those underlying signals and signs that were part of our culture all along, proving ‘that the actual world constantly brings to the surface its own signals, and mysteries’ (Agee 2004: 10).

Biography

James Rufus Agee was born on 27 November 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he edited the Harvard Advocate (1928–1932). He was a reporter and staff writer for Fortune (1932–1939). From 1939 he was a book reviewer and from 1941 to 1948 both a feature writer and film reviewer for Time magazine. He was film columnist for the Nation from 1942 to 1948. In 1948 he was co-director of the film In the Street. He received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for A Death in the Family. He died of a heart attack in New York on 16 May 1955.

Primary texts

Agee, J. (1965) A Way of Seeing: Photographs by Helen Levitt, New York, NY: Viking Press, pp7–15.

Agee, J. (2004) Many Are Called, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Agee, J. and Evans, W. (1941) Let us now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Secondary texts

Bergreen, L. (1984) James Agee: A Life, New York, NY: Dutton.

Blinder, C. (ed) (2010) New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let us now Praise Famous Men, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lofaro, M. A. (ed) (1992) James Agee: Reconsiderations, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

Lofaro, M. A. and Davis, H. (eds) (2005) James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let us now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

Madden, D. (ed) (1974) Remembering James Agee, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

Maharidge, D. and Williamson, M. (1989) And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let us now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South, New York, NY: Pantheon.

Stott, W. (1974) Documentary Expression and 1930s America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Trachtenberg, A. (1989) Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Malek Alloula (1937–)

David Evans

Malek Alloula is an Algerian writer and poet, based in Paris since 1967. He has a keen interest in photography about his home country, and has written for a range of books covering topics such as photographs of nineteenth-century Algiers (Alloula 2001b) and photographs of the moment of national independence following the Franco-Algerian War (1954–1962) (Alloula 2009). All of Alloula’s writings on photography and Algeria are of note, but his reputation as a photo-theorist is primarily based on one book: Le Harem Colonial: Images d’un sous-érotisme (The Colonial Harem: Images of a Suberoticism), originally published in France and Switzerland in 1981, and appearing as a new edition in France with an afterword by the author in 2001. In 1986 an English-language version with the shorter title The Colonial Harem was published simultaneously in the US and the UK as a volume in the prestigious series Theory and History of Literature, edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, under the auspices of the University of Minnesota Press. Basically, it was Alloula’s inclusion in this series, and the ensuing exposure to large audiences beyond the Francophone world, that resulted in international interest in him as a significant post-colonial photo-theorist.

The Colonial Harem contains reproductions of 90 postcards plus critical commentary. Most of the images were created in photographic studios in Algiers between 1900 and 1930, mainly to be sent as postcards to metropolitan France. All show Algerian women veiled and – more often – unveiled. The postcards often have the generic title Scenes and Types, implying that what is being represented has some ethnographic value. Rarely so, Alloula insists, for the postcards are generally staged studio shots. Models, often prostitutes, use a stock of costumes, jewellery and elementary props to act out a limited repertory of themes, oscillating between pseudo-ethnography and the vulgarized iconography of Orientalist painting. The fictional nature of the ‘Scenes’ and ‘Types’ is vividly conveyed when Alloula presents three postcards showing the same model, wearing the same outfit, in the same studio, but with different titles: ‘Young Beduin woman’, ‘Young woman from the South’ and ‘Young Kabyl woman’ (Alloula 1986: 62, 63, 65). This explains the author’s use of the lowercase word algérienne to describe a role-playing female model, to be clearly distinguished from the actual uppercase Algérienne.

The Algérienne is often veiled and this poses problems. The photographer is supposed to provide a comprehensive inventory for the French colonial masters who want clear, unimpeded views of all of their property. But a disturbing opacity remains as long as women conceal themselves. Moreover, they can see without being seen, and in a particularly inspired passage, Alloula imagines the veiled woman as a mimic, aggressing and frustrating the male photographer by acting like a human camera:

These veiled women are not only an embarrassing enigma to the phot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Alphabetical List of Entries
• Contributors
• Preface
• Fifty Key Writers on Photography
• Glossary
• Reference
• Index