Abstract: This essay focuses on the relationship between an amateur photographer, Marian Adams, and her husband, the writer and historian Henry Adams, in the larger context of the history of photography’s influence on American literary culture. Since the advent of the daguerreotype in the late 1830s, writers all over the world have embraced and attacked, adored and ignored, the idea of photographic representation. The collision between writing and photography has shaped particular works as well as broader movements, from realism to naturalism to modernism. Macabre as it is, the tradition of postmortem photography touches close to the heart of photography’s enduring power. The relationship between Marian and Henry Adams helps to reveal some of the specific ways in which American writers have tried to collect and curate the intimations of mortality and impermanence they inevitably confront in photography.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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