F. Richard Thomas argues convincingly that Alfred Stieglitz wielded an extraordinary influence on the works of such literary figures as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, and William Carlos Williams. The implications of his argument bear not only on the aesthetics, styles, and perceptions of these major American literary figures but on the progress of contemporary photography as well.
The four writers Thomas studies here all used aspects of photography in their individual aesthetics andenriched their styles through selective focus on personally significant detail. Each one isolated events to reveal ideas in an impressionistic way. Plot and narration gave way to associative coherence; feelings were conveyed by revealing relationships that existed among objects within the writer’s frame. In their lives as well as in their art, they came to subscribe to a philosophy based on the immediate and the actual.
“The camera has been well proved the instrument of personal perception in a number of living hands, but in the hands of Alfred Stieglitz it becomes the instrument of something more especially vital—apprehension. . . . Speed is at the bottom of it all—the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture infinitely: the moment made eternal.”— Hart Crane, Letters
About the Author
F. Richard Thomas is Professor of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University. He has been the editor of Centering, a magazine of poetry and short fiction, since 1973. Among his publications is Frog Praises Night (1980) published by Southern Illinois University Press.
