American Photo-Text, 1930-1960

Caroline Blinder is Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blinder has written extensively on the intersections between photography and text, starting with Henry Miller’s work on Brassaï in her first book, A Self-Made Surrealist: Henry Miller (1999) and since then in book chapters and articles on amongst others, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Weegee, Robert Frank, and recently Richard Misrach. She teaches American Literature, Film, and Culture at Goldsmiths University. London.

Blinder’s astute readings are framed within a sophisticated understanding of the aesthetic and political contexts of the period, alert to the incongruities and nuances of the collaboration between photographers and writers, images and text. This is a powerful study of the work that has defined American culture.

• Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: The American Phototext Part I: The 1930s1. Portraiture as Place: From Pictorialism to ModernismDoris Ulman and Julia Peterkin’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) 2. Articulating the Depression: Two Contesting Visions Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus (1939) and Margaret Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) 3. Establishing A photographic VernacularWalker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) Part II: The 1940s4. ‘A Book for All that’: Modernism as Documentary Practice James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) 5. The American Heartland: Interrogating a Post-War PastoralWright Morris’s The Inhabitants (1945) and The Home Place (1948) 6. ‘Their First Murder’: Hardboiled Captions and Flashgun AestheticsWeegee’s Naked City (1945) Part III: The 1950s7. An American Alphabet: Writing Democracy in New England Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time In New England (1950) 8. Back at Home: Neighborhood and Community in the 1950sLangston Hughes and Ray DeCarava’s Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) 9. ‘On The Road’: The Photographer as Outsider Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) Conclusion Index