Introduction
Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis: Lyrical
Representations of Photographs from the 19th
Century to the Present
Andrew Miller
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9781781381908
Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: May 2016
DOI: 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381908.001.0001
Introduction
Andrew D. Miller
This book is not about photography, but about the poems that describe it. It is not an
examination of photographic images, but rather an exploration of how those images are
reconstructed in verse from the 19th century to the present. It is not an investigation into
photographic messages, but an analysis of how the residues of those messages influence the
poems that evoke them. Fundamentally, then, this book is a study of the ekphrasis of
photography. To date, there have been a number of studies of ekphrasis: that is, the literary
description of the visual arts. However, little work has been done in examining the ekphrasis of
photographs. Why is this the case? In our present visual culture, where photography extends the
reaches of our gaze and the recollection of our memories, there is no shortage of works both in
prose and poetry that take photography as their subject. Such a study, then, would seem to be a
given, and yet literary critics have been more or less silent about the descriptions of
photography in poetry. There are a few notable exceptions: John Hollander and Stephen Cheeke
include chapters in their examinations of ekphrasis that address some of the issues of
photography. In addition, in their studies of the relationship between photography and literature
critics such as Jefferson Hunter, Françoise Meltzer, Michael North, W.J.T. Mitchell and François
Brunet have dedicated portions of their discussions to the subject of literary descriptions of
photographs (see Hollander 1995; Cheeke 2008; Hunter 1987; Meltzer 1987; North 2005; Brunet
2009). However, none of these examinations may be termed comprehensive, for none of them
has acknowledged that the ekphrasis of photography is not merely a matter of describing
another visual medium. The ekphrasis of photography encompasses the very nature of literary
description (p.2) in the post-photographic era. A study of this trope therefore provides insight
into the nature of modernity, its visual culture and its concepts of memory, knowledge and
experience.
The reason why critics have not yet offered a comprehensive study of the ekphrasis of
photography would seem to stem from the complexity and relative newness of the photographic
message. To date, critics who have sought to address the overall aspects of ekphrasis—that is, to
define the entirety of the trope from the poems of Homer to the writing of the present day—have
tended to simplify the issues related to photography, suggesting that the comparatively recent
ekphrasis of photography is somehow a minor variation of the established ekphrastic trope,
rather than a unique version meriting independent critical study. Additionally, critics who
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Introduction
discuss the overall relationship between photography and poetry are apt to neglect the issue of
ekphrasis altogether in the interest of identifying the influences of photography on poetry or
poetry on photography. Such discussions, then, are either focused upon the entire ekphrastic
trope, which can be defined in a manner that makes it applicable to all sorts of visual media, or
they are committed to the necessary relationships and frictions that exist between visual and
verbal media.1
(p.3) However, this study presents a definition of the ekphrasis of photography that entails a
departure from other definitions of the trope, and it also distinguishes itself from discussions of
the connections and frictions that exist between photography and poetry. In the latter case, this
is because the study’s primary focus is on individual poems’ receptions of photographs. Thus,
the study is principally a literary analysis. In the case of the former distinction, what is central to
this study is the idea that the ekphrasis of photography, more often than not, involves itself in a
narrative. This narrative can be distinguished from other ekphrastic narratives, such as those
described by James Heffernan in his Museum of Words (1993). Whereas definitions such as
Heffernan’s focus on the descriptions of stories occurring within plastic works of art, the
narratives that occur in the ekphrasis of photography generally involve themselves in describing
stories that occur between poetic speakers and the photographs they regard. In short,
recognizing that photographs have the semiotic functions of indexical signs, and thus have the
power to point back into the past and to reference their subjects, this study asserts that the
ekphrasis of photography very often describes an encounter between the ekphrastic subject and
the viewer–speaker who describes this subject.
Central to the definition of the ekphrasis of photography is what I term “The Chronotope of the
Photograph,” after Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of literary chronotopes, discussed at length in the
next chapter. Using a passage from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A Brief History of
Photography,” the chapter outlines what I term “the primal scene of the ekphrasis of a
photograph.” This scene centers on the encounter that Benjamin describes between himself and
Mrs. Elizabeth Hall, the photographic subject of one of David Octavius Hill and Robert
Adamson’s photographs. Examining this encounter closely, the chapter isolates those elements
of the ekphrasis of photography that are unique to this form (p.4) of ekphrasis and reveals how
these elements contribute to creating the chronotope of the photograph.
What follows that chapter, then, might best be termed a genre study, in that the nine chapters of
this book are laid out in such a way as to map the ekphrastic trope when it engages the medium
of photography, thereby laying the groundwork for further study of this increasingly prominent
aspect of poetic expression. These chapters proceed as follows.
The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone: the 19th Century
The Chronotope of the Photograph is founded on 19th-century conceptions of photography.
Conceptions of the medium in the era of its invention hail the photograph as an essential image,
which is capable of documenting both the surface and the depth of its subject. In short, the
earliest ekphrases of photographs come to regard photographic images as being evidential of
their subjects’ spiritual character. What this means for these poems is that they often engage in
a Platonic rhetoric about photographs. As we will see, this Platonism will stay with photography,
at least as poets describe it, well into the 20th century.
Indeed, it is what will set many of the poems examined in this study at odds with post-modern
critics of photography. Critics such as Victor Burgin, for instance, characterize essentialist
attitudes toward photographs as “relics” of the primitive past that “obstruct” our view to the
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Introduction
manipulated rhetoric of the photographic image (Burgin 1986, 51).2 This study does not set out
to debate such issues with critics such as Burgin. Rather, it recognizes that, whether this
essentialist attitude may be called a relic or not, it corresponds to those attitudes most
commonly expressed in the ekphrasis of photographs. Time and time again, the ekphrasis of
photographs comes to celebrate the photograph not merely as a representation but as an
essence of the thing itself. I have endeavored to honor this attitude, for, despite modern critical
positions, poets as diverse as Herman Melville, John Ashbery and Zbigniew Herbert embrace
photography as a means of encountering the photographic subject as though that subject were
present.
For this reason, the study begins in a somewhat historical manner with the poets of the 19th
century. In the first analytic chapter I examine four (p.5) 19th-century poems that invoke this
kind of Platonic essentialism: Pope Leo XIII’s “Ars Photographica,” Herman Melville’s “On the
Photograph of a Corps Commander,” Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing” and Walt
Whitman’s “My Picture-Gallery.” What pervades these four poems is an essentialist attitude
toward photography: regarding the photographs that they describe as essential, the speakers of
these poems posture themselves as interpreters of images. The nature of their interpretations,
however, does not entail the surface details recorded by the photographs they describe, but how
these photographs have captured the spiritual nature of their subjects. Thus, the first subclass of
the chronotope entails a narrative in which the poetic speaker guides the reader through the
image. It is as if the reader has entered a lyceum, museum-talk or scientific lecture, in that,
while the reader is not mentioned in these poems, our presence is felt, for we are the addressees
of speakers who would teach us about the truth in the photographs they are describing. In
addressing the reader, these poems involve apostrophes, in that their speakers “turn away” (the
traditional meaning of the apostrophe) from us to point to an essential aspect within the
photograph, and then turn back to us to explain this detail. I term this subclass the ekphrasis of
the cicerone. As the final word in the phrase suggests, the role assumed by these speakers
aligns itself with a ciceronian expertise that these poems seek to impart to their readers.
The essential qualities that these ciceronian speakers attribute to photographs anticipate the
eight other subclasses of the chronotope of the photograph, in that, again and again, later
poems return to the kind of Platonic essentialism described in these 19th-century poems. Still,
there are distinctions among the different ways that later poems endorse this essentialism, as
mapped in the eight other distinct sub-classes examined in depth in the chapters that follow my
discussion of the 19th century. These subclasses are summarized below.
The Snapshot Elegy
In this version of the chronotope, the poetic speakers access the dead via photographs, often
resurrecting them by way of describing their images. Such resurrections complicate—even foil—
the distancing work of mourning that figures prominently in the elegiac tradition. The chapter
examines Ivor Gurney’s “Photographs,” Thomas Hardy’s “The Photograph” and Philip Larkin’s
“Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.”
(p.6) The Suppressed Ekphrasis
Because photography vicariously allows a writer to travel great distances and to examine minute
or even microscopic subjects, the camera has become the writer’s eyes, allowing him or her to
see things that would otherwise be beyond his or her experience. Yet these pseudo-travels and
experiences are themselves foiled if they are exposed as coming from the study of photographs.
As this chapter argues, consciously or not, much of modern writing involves suppressed
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Introduction
ekphrasis. To demonstrate the means whereby an ekphrasis becomes suppressed, the chapter
examines two poems that do not totally obscure their ekphrastic sources, but in some manner
allude to them: Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” and Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe
Man.”
The Iconic Photograph
A number of photographs obtain such a degree of public prominence and familiarity that they
can be said to be iconic. When ekphrastic reference is made to such an iconic photograph, the
poem addresses its public quality. Its speaker departs from the private realm of the snapshot
into a public forum, in which his or her impressions of the image must be weighed against the
photograph’s cultural—even pan-cultural—significance. The chapter focuses attention on three
poems that describe Nick Ut’s photograph entitled “Horror of War,” and a fourth poem, Ernesto
Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe.”
The Ekphrastic Calligram
The late 20th century sees the first examples of ekphrastic poems that are juxtaposed, in print,
with the actual photographic images they describe. Such texts can therefore be seen as
captioning the accompanying photographs and forming what Michel Foucault terms calligrams
(textimage bonds). These bonds alter the function of the poems, shifting away from the work of
description and allowing the speakers to address and even interact with the photographic
subjects. Thus, such poems are the fullest manifestation of the chronotope of the photograph, in
that text and image encounter one other. The chapter examines a section from Thom Gunn’s
Positives, Richard Howard’s “Charles Baudelaire” and John Logan’s “On a Photograph by Aaron
Siskind.”
The Anti-Ekphrasis
This subclass involves the unraveling of the calligram that is formed (p.7) between the poem
and the photograph. Ultimately, the poem denies the relationship between itself and its
ekphrastic source. The anti-ekphrasis serves as a caution, calling our attention to the way
representations may be used to misrepresent. The chapter examines the poem “Sensationalism”
by Larry Levis.
The Speaking Photograph
In this subclass of the chronotope, the poet adopts the persona of the photographic subject and
addresses the reader directly, rather than assigning to the reader the role of an eavesdropper.
The poet thereby engages in prosopopoeia: giving a voice to a silent image. By speaking to the
reader as if from a photograph—and beckoning the reader to look at it—the poetic speaker
makes an ekphrasis of him or herself. The chapter examines sections from Bertolt Brecht’s War
Primer and Adam Thorpe’s “Navaho.”
Shadows of the Former Self
The works within this subclass engage in a strange psychology, one that would seem to run
contrary to the attitudes expressed in other versions of the chronotope: rather than hailing a
photographic portrait of the self as having life and presence, the poetic speakers generally shun
the photograph of the self, recognizing their own images as threatening them with mortality. The
chapter examines: Robert Penn Warren’s “Old Photograph of the Future,” Zbigniew Herbert’s
“Photograph” and John Ashbery’s “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers.”
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Introduction
The Photoshopped Image
Digital imaging has shifted poetic attention away from the photographic subject and back to the
process of making or altering a photograph. Such a change of perspective flies in the face of
much of what poets previously celebrated about photographs, for it is the manipulation of the
image that now becomes its most powerful evidence of presence. These poems take our present
study full-circle, for, having begun with the poems of the 19th century, which celebrate
photography as means of enhancing vision and accessing essential truths, the poems of the
digital age celebrate it as means of diminishing vision and altering the events of the past. The
chapter examines Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s “I scanned my photograph from the first year” and
“Resolution,” and Klara Nowakowska’s “Low Resolution.”
(p.8) In mapping these subclasses, I have sought to develop a workable set of terms that may
allow readers and subsequent scholars to follow and build on my observations without being
hampered by rigid theoretical structures. My hope, then, is that the influence of such writers as
Aristotle, William James and William Empson can be felt throughout this book. Following the
taxonomic approaches of these writers, my goal has been to devise categories that facilitate
understanding above all else. Furthermore, as James and Empson recognize at the beginning of
their own taxonomies: no category is without exceptions. The same is true here. The poems I
have selected are not limited to one subclass. From time to time, there are crossovers. Where
these occur, I call attention to them. I have organized the chapters in a way that allows the
reader to gain an increasingly complex understanding of the layers of meaning that photography
has provided modern poetry. From the first to the last chapter, this book seeks, then, to
introduce each subclass as an outgrowth of the preceding one. I have also sought to stay close to
the poems themselves. Close reading is the ethos behind all of the examinations here, in that
there is no better way of recognizing the representational and cultural complexities of
photography than by closely examining how photography affects the language that describes it.
The nuances of poetic language delineate these complexities. Such nuances are what this book
sets out to describe.
Notes:
(1) A comprehensive bibliography of critical works dealing with ekphrasis (also written as
“ecphrasis”) is not possible within the introduction of this study. Here, I mention only those
critical voices that have been especially beneficial for me in gaining perspective on the
ekphrasis of photography. However, were one to make a greater list of critics, one would need to
begin with such persons as Gisbert Kranz, Valerie Robillard, Els Jongeneel, Murray Krieger, to
name only a few of the scholars in this field. Indeed, the critical literature on ekphrasis is
extensive and capacious. In addition, the boundaries of the trope are difficult to define. This
difficulty arises not only from the extensive number of critical works that have addressed
ekphrasis directly but also from the even more extensive number of critical works that have
entered into examinations of the trope without identifying themselves as examinations of
ekphrasis. For example, while in his Image and Word Jefferson Hunter engages in one of the first
studies of the ekphrasis of photography, he does not use the term “ekphrasis” in itself. Equally,
in his Photography and Literature, François Brunet briefly touches on the trope, but focuses his
attentions in another direction. Similar difficulties arise when one realizes that, in its classical
definitions, ekphrasis is not relegated merely to literary descriptions of visual images. As
Quintilian and other classical rhetoricians describe the trope, ekphrasis is a matter of discriptio
(description). Through the use of enargeia or evidentia, the orator or writer creates for the
listener or reader a figura mentis (a mental image of that object). Thus, at least among classical
authors, the trope involves an intensified descriptive language, which can be applied universally.
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Introduction
This problem is not resolved in modern critical discussions; for example, in his seminal work,
Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992), Murray Krieger also describes the trope as
surpassing descriptions of art. For Krieger, ekphrasis is one of the aspects of literary description
in general. To extend the difficulties of definition and critical evaluation even further, it must be
recognized that ekphrasis is not reserved for literature alone. Rather, ekphrasis figures as well
within music, and it is exemplified in such works as Luciano Berio’s symphonic work
“Ekphrasis” (1996). These difficulties have inspired me to simplify my critical discussion as
much as possible, and to include discussion by those critics who can best inform and enhance
my own insights.
(2) It is W.J.T. Mitchell who first takes issue with this point of Burgin’s in “Visible Language: The
Photographic Essay, Four Case Studies,” which appears in Mitchell 1995.
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