The American Photo-Text, 1930-1960

Caroline Blinder

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2019

The American Photo-Text, 1930-1960

Caroline Blinder

In the series BAAS Paperbacks

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474404112

Overview
Contents

About this book

Focuses on the intersections between text and photography in the twentieth-century American photo-text

This critical study of the American photo-text focuses on the interaction between text and images in twentieth-century American photography as well as the discourse surrounding image-text collaboration on a wider level. In looking at books designed as collaborative efforts between writers and photographers and by photographer/writers adding their own narrative text, it establishes the photo-text as a genre related to and yet distinct from other documentary efforts.

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 landscapes, this survey constitutes an invaluable entry into how we read the politics of twentieth-century American photography.

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
Situates the various case studies with reference to the political, social and economic developments of the period
Re-establishes the book form as particularly crucial for an understanding of American Documentary photography

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction: The American Photo-Text Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I: THE 1930s
1. Portraiture as Place in Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. Articulating the Depression in Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus (1939) and Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3. Establishing a Photographic Vernacular in Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
PART II: THE 1940s
4. Modernism as Documentary Practice in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
5. A Post-War Pastoral in Wright Morris’s The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
6. Hardboiled Captions and Flashgun Aesthetics in Weegee’s Naked City (1945) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
PART III: THE 1950s
7. Ideology, History and Democracy in Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time in New England (1950) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
8. Visions of Harlem in Langston Hughes and Ray DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
9. Beat Poetics in The Americans (1959) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Illustrations
- Other: 32 B/W illustrations
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 9781474404112