When Henry James re-edited his complete works for the so-called New York Editions, photography had recently emerged as an artistic technology and a shiny new means of telling stories. Critics such as Charles Baudelaire scorned the camera, claiming it didn't allow for human interpretation of events the way painting did. It didn't allow the audience to use their imagination, either. "It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me," Baudelaire wrote. "I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial."
But as any photographer will tell you, people view the world from different vantage points. Where some saw a stifling medium of mindless shutter-clicking, James saw an opportunity. He hired a photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn to illustrate the covers of his novels and asked that the artist abide by one rule: That the images suggest more than they specify.
Today, a...
But as any photographer will tell you, people view the world from different vantage points. Where some saw a stifling medium of mindless shutter-clicking, James saw an opportunity. He hired a photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn to illustrate the covers of his novels and asked that the artist abide by one rule: That the images suggest more than they specify.
Today, a...
- 3/7/2012
- by Madeleine Crum
- Huffington Post
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