Photopoetry 1845-2015

Michael Nott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501332241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History represents the first account of this challenging and diverse body of work. Nott traces the development of photopoetic collaboration from its roots in 19th-century illustrative practices to the present day. Focusing on work from the UK and US, he examines how and why poets and photographers collaborate, and explores the currents of exchange and engagement between poems and photographs on the page. The book not only considers canonical figures, but brings to light forgotten practitioners whose work questioned and shaped the relationship between word and image. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History provides a new lens through which to explore poetry, photography, and the spaces between them.

1

‘... with Photographic Illustrations’

The Birth of British Photopoetry, 1845–1875

From illustrated novels to the popular press, the Victorian obsession with relationships between text and image is often discussed without mention of poetry. Accordingly, these discussions overlook the subtle interplay between verse and perhaps its least likely artistic bedfellow: photography.

In the early years of photographically illustrated books, grave doubts were expressed about the subjects and forms of writing most suitable for photographic accompaniment. As the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in 1867,

The class of illustration to which photography can be applied is obviously limited. It cannot create, it can only copy; its results are descriptive rather than suggestive. Its subjects must be real, and we cannot therefore illustrate poetry or fiction by it.¹

Photopoetry as we know it today emerged from the refutation of such attitudes. Already by 1867 some thirteen books of photographically illustrated poetry had been published, and a further twenty-eight would be in print by the turn of the century. These are books, remarks Jennifer Green-Lewis, ‘about which it is remarkably hard to say anything, and yet in which something profoundly interesting seems to be going on’.² This ‘something’ is a more symbiotic connection between poem and photograph than the summary ‘descriptive rather than suggestive’ or the term ‘photographically illustrated’ are generous enough to conceive. An exploration of this ‘something’ is the purpose of my first chapter.

Writing in 2017, in a culture saturated as never before with visual images and information, it is difficult to comprehend the kind of epistemic rupture caused by photography and its forbears. For Victorians seeing a daguerreotype, calotype, stereograph or photograph for the first time, their appreciation of representational time and space would have been transformed beyond any conceivable modern-day equivalent: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example, extolled the daguerreotype’s ‘mesmeric disembodiment of spirits’, and how ‘the very shadow of the person lying there [is] fixed for ever!’³ The place and importance of photography in the evolution of human consciousness is beyond the scope of this book, let alone this chapter, yet I hope to suggest the significance of ‘photopoetry’ to one of the most significant upheavals in consciousness since the development of literate culture. The formal, stylistic, and thematic development of photographically illustrated poetry in the nineteenth century brought together two seemingly incompatible modes of expression into a new, multisensory way of capturing the past, of memorializing people and places.

While Helen Groth has identified nostalgia as a fundamental dynamic of Victorian interrelations between poetry and photography – and Victorian literary culture in general – what her work overlooks is twofold.⁴ First, Groth’s study of memory is not situated within a nexus of visual, verbal, and haptic roots governing the dissemination and consumption of poetry and photography. Hence the second absence: while compelling, her analyses of early photographically illustrated poetry books exclude a much more common practice of photopoetic combination in Victorian Britain, that of the domestic scrapbook. These represent some of the most fertile exploratory sites in nineteenth-century text/image experiments. This chapter expands the sensory and cultural scope of Groth’s argument, exploring the emergence of photopoetry in the public and private worlds of the nineteenth century. Only with an understanding of these early roots will meaningful discussion of later, twentieth-century innovations become possible and, indeed, fruitful.

Similarly, Groth discusses only one format of nineteenth-century photopoetry: the photobook. While this would become the standard photopoetic format from around 1880, only by considering other experiments with stereography and combination photographs can we gain a richer understanding of photopoetic history. This first chapter examines these formats in order to elucidate fully the chief thematic strands of photopoetry in the nineteenth century, the picturesque and the theatrical. While the picturesque proved most commercially popular, the theatrical encounter shaped the most innovative photopoetry. While the frame embodies the division between humans and nature, the aesthetics of staging attempt to collapse this division and, in photopoetry, place the reader/viewer at the centre of the network of visual and verbal images.⁵ This is the case in theatrical and picturesque photopoetry: this chapter traces the development of both strands, and concludes with a discussion of their comparative importance to later photopoetry. Attempting to define the place and importance of photopoetry is to stake a claim for the importance of a hitherto overlooked aspect of Victorian visual culture; and, more boldly, to suggest an origin of sorts for a radical, nineteenth-century innovation that remained central to modernist aesthetics and beyond.

Framing the body

An important aspect of domestic life, scrapbooks and commonplace books acted as repositories for much cultural experience of middle- and upper-class women. The centuries-old practices of scrapbooking and commonplacing changed dramatically in the nineteenth century because of the growing dissemination of images. Driven by the diminishing costs of the illustrated press, a raft of image-driven periodicals such as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic emerged in which image was given as important a representational purpose as text.⁶ Text and image clippings thus existed on scrapbook pages alongside handwritten fragments, sketches, pasted-in photographs, watercolours, locks of hair, and other ephemera. These multisensory albums, in Roland Barthes’s terms, are ‘multi-dimensional space[s]‌ in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, and can be read, alongside poetry albums and friendship books, as more private and solitary texts than the familial structure of storytelling in photograph albums, a distinction that becomes more important when we consider photopoetry and publication.⁷

The compilation essential to scrapbooks and commonplace books necessitates an approach to text/image studies focusing on the relationship between reading, writing, and touching. In scrapbooks, photographs are primarily sources of information and enjoyment, as one important but little-known album testifies. The album, held at the University of St Andrews, contains six pasted-in calotypes, each accompanied by a handwritten quatrain.⁸ The anonymous verse appears never to have been published.⁹ Five photographs show a female figure either sitting or kneeling; in the sixth she stands, the culmination of a narrative in which she remains loyal to her absent lover and is rewarded with marriage upon his return.

As for the album’s provenance, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), inventor of the calotype process, had several Scottish disciples including John Adamson (1809–1870), the renowned St Andrews physician who produced the first calotype portrait in Scotland in 1841.¹⁰ Adamson’s younger brother, Robert (1821–1848), became a professional photographer in Edinburgh and formed, with David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), perhaps the first canonical partnership in photographic history. It has been suggested that we might attribute the St Andrews album to Hill and Adamson, and tentatively date it c.1845. This is for two reasons: first, the quality of the calotypes is very similar to other Hill and Adamson work of this period. Second, the album’s narrative is potentially biographical, evoking the ties between Hill and Adamson and the St Andrews photographic community. Baillie W. Tulloch, the grandson of John Tulloch (1823–1886), former professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at St Andrews, donated the album to the university in 1948. In July 1845, John Tulloch married Jane Anna Sophia Hindmarsh in Jersey, following a courtship during which the couple faced numerous periods of separation.¹¹ It is possible Hindmarsh is the young woman in the photographs.

The title of the album, A Little Story for Grown Young Ladies, Illustrated Photographically, is one of the first uses of the phrase ‘illustrated photographically’ to describe a book or scrapbook containing photographs. This phrase became commonplace in the titles of such works from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and often implies a scrupulously literal connection between poems and photographs that restricts our understanding of these early experimental works. Use of the phrase implies textual superiority over the image, in which the photograph is taken to possess a merely ‘descriptive’ function. In fact, however, it is often difficult to tell whether poem ‘illustrates’ photograph or vice versa, or whether ‘illustration’ itself is a reductive term for any combination of text and image. The term ‘photographic illustration’ is enriched when we consider the visual, verbal, and tactile manners in which the reader/viewer interacts with works of photopoetry, and how, in the process of ...