‘The two most revolutionary technological advances in human consciousness are the invention of writing and then the ability to record life as-it-is in the form of photography and sound recording.’ So argues Ed Simon in his essay The Miracle of Photography on his The Millions blog (https://themillions.com/author/ed-simon). It’s a fascinating and refreshing read, drawing on a wide range of references and sources. I’ve picked out below what he says about photography and fiction.
‘Painters reacted to the rise of the photograph by embracing abstraction. Impressionism, with its consideration of color and light, proceeds from photography. … Meanwhile literary modernism, with its attraction towards fragmentation, bricolage, and multiple perspectives, resembled an assemblage of photographs hanging on a gallery wall, with the poetic embrace towards lyric an acknowledgement that each picture is as if a poem. Because Western chauvinism has largely resisted the integration of word and image, canonical novels which integrate photography is surprisingly slim. Virginia Woolf‘s 1928 novel Orlando included a photograph of her lover Vita Sackville-West as the gender bending titular character. W.G. Sebald included pictures in his novels The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, writing in that last title that “It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space,” a succinct description of the post-Daguerre world. Poets, perhaps because they already worked in a form that is episodic and crystalline, embraced the new technology more fully. Dadaist artist Man Ray and poet PaulEluard produced a volume that combined both in Facile, while more current titles include Lisa Scalapino‘s Crowd and Not Evening or Light and poet Ian Thomas‘s and photographer Jon Ellis‘s I Wrote This for You.’