Writing with Light

Contributor Martin Padget’s essay: «Native Americans, the Photobook and the Southwest: Ansel Adams’s and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo was awarded the 2010 Arthur Miller Essay Prize.
This book is an integrated collection of essays on the interface between literature and photography, as exemplified in important North American texts. The aspects of this increasingly debated topic treated here include: the evidential nature of the photographic image; evocations of photographs in poetry and fiction; ways in which photographs ‘illustrate’ literary works; the status and function of words in photographic anthologies; and the formal structure(s) of full-blown interactions of the verbal and the visual in works that constitute ‘photo-texts’. Contributors to the volume probe ways of reading particular and often celebrated combinations of words and photographs as cultural documents of their time – and ours. Achieving a better understanding of their social context often illuminates important themes of American history, such as ethnic, regional, class or gender identification and difference.