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1 Loy among the photographers
Poetry, perception, and the camera
In one of her most direct comparisons of the eye to the camera, Loyâs âCeiling at Dawnâ presents the moments of first awakening as a distinctively visual process. Aroused to morning light, the âunclosing eyeâ witnesses a âCinema-Nirvanaâ that merges dream with the âspectral acreâ of dayâs âearly light.â Projected upon the screen-like âWhite slab slanted ceiling,â the remnants of the âtraffic of slumberâ and the âshadow-drifts / of indoor dawnâ mingle in a âfilmâ of âpallid ideogramsâ and âVisual echoesâ as the âdroning day / dilates / in early light.â1 The poemâs reliance upon a language of visual experience â âeye,â âCamera-Nirvana,â âspectral,â âfilm,â âideograms,â âdilatesâ â and metaphors of filmic processes (the ceiling as projector, or perhaps film negative) melds human and camera vision, as though one cannot be understood without the other.2 If visual experience and the âconditions of modern visualityâ are marked by the primacy of the camera across modernist literature, Loyâs work offers significant evidence of both direct and indirect intersections of photography and poetry, grounded in socio-historical and personal contexts connecting her to photographyâs evolution during the opening years of the twentieth century and beyond.3
Tracing various of these connections, this chapter considers cross-currents between Loy as the subject of the camera and the forms of photographic vision emerging in her work. Photographic portraits of Loy historicize her links to modern photography and the range of aesthetics familiar to her, while illuminating gender dynamics attending modern and avant-garde photography. Loyâs presence before the camera lens â as portrait subject, but also object of a usually male gaze â coincides with her interest in the figure of the photographer and the issues of gender clustered around the male photographer appearing in her unpublished autobiographical work Islands in the Air.4 As I argue in discussing this prose text, a gendered apprehension of visual processes, technologies, and practices frames Loyâs approach to the visual as a structuring force of identity and power within modernity, enhanced by the twentieth centuryâs growing immersion in photographic images, technologies, and practices. The final section of the chapter surveys ways in which concepts of vision and perception surface across a wide range of Loyâs poetry, proposing how this broadly evident interest motivates a modern orientation toward technologies, practices, and the cultural impact of photographic vision throughout the modernist poetics of Mina Loy.
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Portraits and photographers
The camera loved Mina Loy. Photographers revolutionizing the medium â from Man Ray, to George Platt Lynes, to Berenice Abbott, to Lee Miller â captured her image and those of her daughters in portraits as striking for the beauty of their subjects as for the technical virtuosity. The genre of the portrait suggests an important access to Loyâs relationship with the camera, for in life she was âone of the modernist avant-gardeâs most photographed womenâ and, as Susan Dunn has argued, her experiences before the camera arguably shape her own poetic representations of women.5 Moreover, photographic portraits of Loy register across a visual range of photographic aesthetics, indicating how diverse her encounters with photographic movements and ideas would become over the course of her poetic career and her sense, as Cristanne Miller has argued, of how to manipulate the medium in presenting her image or the image of the âmodern woman,â as she was known.6 Points of intersection between Loy, photographers, and ideas about photography that cross diverse aesthetic ground manifested early in her life and personal relationships, and throughout her career as artist, poet, and designer.
By the time Loy entered the avant-garde scene through her first publications in 1914 in Alfred Stieglitzâs Camera Work, a little magazine that included reproductions of photography as an art form, Loy was already well acquainted with photographyâs emerging status as an art â a view urged by Stieglitz and countering a utilitarian view of the camera as a mechanical means of documentation. Both Loy and Stieglitz had early associations with Pictorialismâs allegiance to bringing painterly techniques into the photographic image, a style that Stieglitz followed, but subsequently rejected. By the 1910s, his âpromotion of unmanipulated photographyâ and interest in urban realism positioned Steiglitz and the Photo-Secessionists as âvanguard figures in shifting favor away from the Pictorialist style of photography, which remained quite popular into the 1930s, to that of âstraight photographyâ.â7 The Pictorialist style, popular in England and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Loy resided in London and Paris, sought to emulate painting through developing and printing techniques that blurred or softened a typically pastoral, domestic, or fine art subject matter. Loyâs portraits by Stephen Haweis, her first husband, dramatize an allegiance (on his part) to the pictorial mode of photography popularized in Europe and America toward the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. In 1903 in Paris, Loy married Haweis, a fellow painting student whose turn to photography took up Pictorialist techniques of moody âartificial lightâ and âretouching prints with a brushâ to produce âdreamy portraits and romantic landscapes.â8 His work attracted attention when he was hired to photograph Auguste Rodinâs sculptures in his studio, from 1903 to 1904. Haweis and his partner Henry Coles gained distinction for creating âphotographies dâartâ rather than mechanical reproductions and often painted âmisty aureolesâ around the sculptures in their images to achieve a more painterly look. A portrait of Rodin taken by Haweis earned praise from the Pall Mall Gazette as âthe most exquisite study that has yet been done of the great sculptor,â and Haweisâ photographs traveled to New York to accompany an exhibit of Rodinâs bronzes; moreover, Rodin was reportedly pleased with the success of the photographies dâart in capturing his work.9
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In images characterized by moody lighting and painterly effects of gesture and composition, Haweis used Loy as his âfavorite model,â photographing her âas a painting come to lifeâ and in âstriking poses.â10 Examples of the âPre-Raphaelite poseâ he preferred include a three-quarter portrait of Loy, leaning forward and holding a small Rodin sculpture, mouth slightly open and eyes gazing sideways at the camera, her face bathed in romantic light. Burke describes the âmost dramatic of these studies,â a 1905 portrait showing Loy âin an old-fashioned dress,â leaning âtowards the camera as if about to swoon or fall from the barely glimpsed Art Nouveau chair . . . Her hands are clasped in meditation, her eyes closed as if to shield her from the spectator.â11 A 1909 gauzy portrait by Haweis, with eyes downcast and bound hair disheveled, provides the frontispiece for The Lost Lunar Baedeker.12 Burke reports that a âportrait of âMiss L.â â surely Mina â also won praiseâ from the Paris American Register review of Haweis and Coleâs work, in which it was said that â[t]he Camera is as pliable as the brush in their practiced hands, and the secrets of light and shadow are to them as accessible as the colors on the painterâs palette,â comparing their photographic style to âthe mĂ©tier of Rossetti or Burne-Jones.â13
Haweisâs private collection included âDusie,â a rather unconventional 1905 portrait of Loy with a cigarette dangling from her lips, although the dramatically moody lighting, the tilted pose of the head in profile, and the downcast eyes echo painterly Pre-Raphaelite imagery. From the same year, another âDusieâ portrait poses Loy nude, her full-length back turned to the camera, and her long dark hair draped to one side. Adopting a âpose of classical statuary, Mina stands lightly off-balance on a Persian rug, her left side framed by richly patterned draperies,â her figure that of a âstudio nude.â14 For Pictorialists, the artistic tradition of the female nude offered a common tactic for bridging photography with âartâ and avoiding scandal in capturing the naked body. The artistic and commercial impulses of Haweisâs photography intertwined in his work for Rodin and his...