Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets

Linda A. Kinnahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781472489197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351793469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, Linda A. Kinnahan explores the making of Mina Loy's late modernist poetics in relation to photography's ascendance, by the mid-twentieth century, as a distinctively modern force shaping representation and perception. As photography develops over the course of the century as an art form, social tool, and cultural force, Loy's relationship to a range of photographic cultures emerging in the first half of the twentieth century suggests how we might understand not only the intriguing work of this poet, but also the shaping impact of photography and new technologies of vision upon modernist poetics. Framing Loy's encounters with photography through intersections of portraiture, Surrealism, fashion, documentary, and photojournalism, Kinnahan draws correspondences between Loy's late poetry and visual discourses of the body, urban poverty, and war, discerning how a visual rhetoric of gender often underlies these mappings and connections. In her final chapter, Kinnahan examines two contemporary poets who directly engage the camera's modern impact –Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall – to explore the questions posed in their work about the particular relation of the camera, the photographic image, and the construction of gender in the late twentieth century.

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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, Loy’s “Ceiling at Dawn” presents the moments of first awakening as a distinctively visual process. Aroused to morning light, the “unclosing eye” witnesses a “Cinema-Nirvana” that merges dream with the “spectral acre” of day’s “early light.” Projected upon the screen-like “White slab slanted ceiling,” the remnants of the “traffic of slumber” and the “shadow-drifts / of indoor dawn” mingle in a “film” of “pallid ideograms” and “Visual echoes” as the “droning day / dilates / in early light.”¹ The poem’s reliance upon a language of visual experience – “eye,” “Camera-Nirvana,” “spectral,” “film,” “ideograms,” “dilates” – 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 “conditions of modern visuality” are marked by the primacy of the camera across modernist literature, Loy’s work offers significant evidence of both direct and indirect intersections of photography and poetry, grounded in socio-historical and personal contexts connecting her to photography’s 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. Loy’s presence before the camera lens – as portrait subject, but also object of a usually male gaze – 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 Loy’s approach to the visual as a structuring force of identity and power within modernity, enhanced by the twentieth century’s 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 Loy’s 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 – from Man Ray, to George Platt Lynes, to Berenice Abbott, to Lee Miller – 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 Loy’s relationship with the camera, for in life she was “one of the modernist avant-garde’s most photographed women” 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 “modern woman,” 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 Stieglitz’s Camera Work, a little magazine that included reproductions of photography as an art form, Loy was already well acquainted with photography’s emerging status as an art – 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 Pictorialism’s allegiance to bringing painterly techniques into the photographic image, a style that Stieglitz followed, but subsequently rejected. By the 1910s, his “promotion of unmanipulated photography” and interest in urban realism positioned Steiglitz and the Photo-Secessionists as “vanguard figures in shifting favor away from the Pictorialist style of photography, which remained quite popular into the 1930s, to that of ‘straight photography’.”⁷ 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. Loy’s 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 “artificial light” and “retouching prints with a brush” to produce “dreamy portraits and romantic landscapes.”⁸ His work attracted attention when he was hired to photograph Auguste Rodin’s sculptures in his studio, from 1903 to 1904. Haweis and his partner Henry Coles gained distinction for creating “photographies d’art” rather than mechanical reproductions and often painted “misty aureoles” 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 “the most exquisite study that has yet been done of the great sculptor,” and Haweis’ photographs traveled to New York to accompany an exhibit of Rodin’s bronzes; moreover, Rodin was reportedly pleased with the success of the photographies d’art 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 “favorite model,” photographing her “as a painting come to life” and in “striking poses.”¹⁰ Examples of the “Pre-Raphaelite pose” 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 “most dramatic of these studies,” a 1905 portrait showing Loy “in an old-fashioned dress,” leaning “towards 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.”¹¹ 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 “portrait of ‘Miss L.’ – surely Mina – also won praise” from the Paris American Register review of Haweis and Cole’s work, in which it was said that “[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 painter’s palette,” comparing their photographic style to “the métier of Rossetti or Burne-Jones.”¹³

Haweis’s private collection included “Dusie,” 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 “Dusie” portrait poses Loy nude, her full-length back turned to the camera, and her long dark hair draped to one side. Adopting a “pose of classical statuary, Mina stands lightly off-balance on a Persian rug, her left side framed by richly patterned draperies,” her figure that of a “studio nude.”¹⁴ For Pictorialists, the artistic tradition of the female nude offered a common tactic for bridging photography with “art” and avoiding scandal in capturing the naked body. The artistic and commercial impulses of Haweis’s photography intertwined in his work for Rodin and his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Loy Among the Photographers: Poetry, Perception, and the Camera
• 2 Surrealism and the Female Body: Economies of Violence
• 3 Portraits of the Poor: The Bowery Poems and the Rise of Documentary Photography
• 4 From Patriotism to Atrocity: The War Poems and Photojournalism
• 5 Gendering the Camera: Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall
• Bibliography
• Index