Writing Photography

Why does literature turn to photography? In 1931, Walter Benjamin prophesied that “captions would become the essential component of pictures” — but just as much as text has accompanied photographs, literary works for the past 150 years have not only commented on, but also incorporated photographs as part of their creative project. Over the course of the semester, we will look at a set of literary texts (with an emphasis on poetry) in which photography plays a central part, from Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja to Eve Ewing’s 1919, an exploration of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. Together, we will ask how writing and photography can work together to document history, construct new kinds of intimacies between author, subject, and audience, and play with the limits of creative form. We will also take a field trip to the Guggenheim’s Taryn Simon exhibit, to see how a contemporary artist uses the interplay of text and image to comment on our world today. The course has no prerequisites, and fulfills the New Media, Poetry, and Comparative requirements for the English major.

Over the course of the semester, we will journey through a series of paired texts, touching on themes of the city, experimentation, intimacy, war, and archive. As we go from pair to pair, we will begin to hear echoes of these themes resonate across works we read earlier on and works we are just encountering, from Jacob A. Riis’s 1890s record of New York slums and André Breton’s surreal 1920s Paris, to Hervé Guibert’s fragile domestic spaces and Don Mee Choi’s reappropriation of her father’s photographs. We will end with the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which brings together some of the strands running through our syllabus: the personal and the political, the gaze and the viewer, the past and the future.