A great find.
More working notes. Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 by Peter B. Hales published in 1984 is a great find. Hales did extensive research resulting in a sort of genre theory of early American photography. His argument for the importance of photography in cultural history mirrors much of what drives me regarding the period I want to focus most intensely on, 1937-41. Hale observes:
Surprisingly enough, little research has been done on the iconography of the American city, or on 19th century urban photographs in general. Most attention has been given to narrow studies of genres or to individual photographers like Arnold Genthe or Lewis Hine. In both cases, limitations of methodology and information, as well as aesthetic bias, have prevented the resulting works from suggesting models or wider concepts of study. (5)
I’m sort of taking my cues from Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. McKeon argues in his summation:
The argument of this study has been that the origins of the English novel, whose climax is signaled by the Richardson-Fielding rivalry of the 1740s, consist in the establishment of a form sufficient for the joint enquiry into analogous epistemological and social problems which themselves had a long prehistory of intense and diversified public debate. Rivalry does not preclude agreement: the real fact of conflict only facilitated the recognition that the two writers were engaged in what was also a common enterprise. (410)
I believe that the same could be said of the dynamic duos of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell vs. Walker Evans and James Agee. Several competing modes of photography were wrapped around the creation of a new form of expression, the photographic book. Obviously, aesthetically Evans and Agee won… at least sort of. I’d like to suggest a wider study of the rhetorical relationship which constructed two disparate heroic images: the artist raging against society, and the heroic American public facing adversity together. The form of the documentary photographic book, in the examples I’m considering, addresses the same epistemological and social problems, with completely different means and ends. In the end, two distinctly different modes of visual rhetorical practice evolved.
