Marianne Moore, Photography, and the Self-In-Flux | Emily Setina

Marianne Moore, Photography, and the Self-in-Flux Emily Setina arianne Moore mentions photography in only one poem, “A Face” of 1947. She took a lifelong interest in the art form, however, and it inflects her poetic Mprocess. A 1909 letter home from Bryn Mawr narrates with characteristic gusto her chance meeting with a niece of photographer Paul Haviland, an “out and out artist” working in “a studio on Fifth Ave. near 33rd St with an Alfred Stieglitz” (Letter to Mary Warner Moore). Already “pining for a chance to leave ‘the kittens my classmates’ at their play and see if things weren’t done anywhere in the right way (except at home),” Moore found this glimpse of the NewYork avant-garde tantalizing. She endorsed Paul Haviland and Stieglitz as “very spirited and young enthusiasm-ists” and enthused over the images she saw in Miss Haviland’s copy of Steiglitz’s Camera Work magazine, declaring them “satisfac- tory in every particular—way beyond pictures (painted),” far different from the “common garden photographs on dull paper” she had expected. Indeed Moore was “taken by storm”—and her interest persisted. When she visited NewYork six years later in December 1915, Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, its address recorded at Bryn Mawr, came first on an ambitious agenda.There she met Stieglitz, initiating the first of many friendships with well-known photographers. Her correspondence files at the Rosenbach Library include personal invitations from Stieglitz, notes from Richard Avedon (signed “Dick”), and hand-drawn Christmas cards from George Platt Lynes. Moore’s prose writings reiterate over the years her affinity for photography and also con- vey an appreciation of its technical challenges. As editor of The Dial in 1925, she hailed Stieglitz’s “Seven Americans” show, which included work by Stiegliz and Paul Strand, as patriotic proof of “creative power” in America (Prose 150). In her 1940 tribute to The Dial, Moore remembers Charles Sheeler’s expertise in “coping with the difficulty of photograph- ing for reproduction Lachaise’s polished brass head of Scofield Thayer . mounted on glass—glitteringly complicated from any angle” (362). Her 1957 forward to a book of Lynes’s images of the NewYork City Ballet praises “[his] understanding of light and impatience with retouching as a substitute for focus” (655). She admires Sheeler and Lynes not only for their work, but also for their understated behavior as artists—fitting to their medium, which seems to allow the artist invisibility behind the lens. Of Sheeler’s work, Moore writes, “[I] have never seen anything effected with less ado or greater care” (362). She defines Lynes English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006 278 English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006 as the photographer who “in a way that is emphasized by absence—contributed to my knowledge of art; not art merely, but to my knowledge of art as behavior” (655). Although her prose evinces admiration for photographers, however, Moore’s poetry omits the art form almost entirely. Poems feature painters from Durer to da Vinci, El Greco to “Redon (Odilon),” Magritte to the “Chinese / who imagined this masterpiece,” but photographers receive mention only in appended notes (Complete Poems 219, 30). “Camellia Sabina,”for example, has two photographic sources: “Mouse with a grape. Photograph by Spencer R. Atkinson, National Geographic Magazine, February 1932” and “The wire cage. Photograph by Alvin E. Worman of Attleboro, Massachusetts” (264). Only the “Notes” at the back of Moore’s Complete Poems mention that we are looking at photographed subjects. In the poem Spencer R. Atkinson’s National Geographic “Mouse with a grape” becomes sim- ply “yonder mouse with a / grape in its hand.”The speaker presents The wire cage of Alvin E. Worman’s photograph as though it exists in three-dimensions. One can move closer to see inside: “The wire cage is / locked, but by bending down and studying the roof, it is pos- sible to see the pantomime of Persian thought” (17). Only much later, in “Blue Bug,”published in 1966, does Moore credit a photographic source on the same page as a poem. She contextualizes her address with the lines: “Upon seeing Dr. RaworthWilliams’ Blue Bug with seven other ponies, photographed byThomas McAvoy: Sports Illustrated” (sic) (218). McAvoy’s photograph, cited below the poem’s title, becomes a more prominent source than those held until the “Notes” at the collection’s end. Even here, however, Moore quickly loses the photographic frame. She looks through rather than at McAvoy’s photograph to address its subject, making “Blue Bug” the “you” of her poetic conversation: “In this camera shot, / from that fine print in which you hide / (eight-pony portrait from the side).” “Bug” looks back, seeing through the photograph on the Sports Illustrated page “to recognize / the recognizing eye” of an observer, the poem’s speaker.The typewritten article accompanying the photograph seems to interfere with Moore’s ability to reach her addressee, filling the page outside the camera shot with “fine print in which you hide.” Photography exerts an influence on Moore’s poetic not so much in its content, and not only via a particular photographic aesthetic, but through her productive engagement with tech- niques and creative processes particular to photography as a medium. In her study on Moore and the visual arts, Linda Leavell demonstrates Moore’s affinity with, “straight photography.”Also known as “pure photography,”the movement eschewed negative and print manipulation in favor of sharp focus, “truth” to the medium and to the object. Leavell argues that a similar ideology under-girds Moore’s precision of language, her criteria of selection, and her motif of seeing as “spiritual” activity (34, 131–32, 210–11).The images that first took Moore “by storm,” however, were not those of “straight photography,” but of its antithesis: pictorialism, a style that used negative and print manipulation to emulate sym- bolist and pre-Raphaelite imagery. In her 1909 letter home from Bryn Mawr, Moore describes two pictorial photographs in the issue of Camera Works as “the book’s ‘peaches’ Emily Setina 279 surely”: “one was called the bubble, a girl crouching over a stream with her arm out, hold- ing a big crystal ball—thin glass or soap bubble of some sort on in and . another of a nymph under the shadow of a tree or bank, splashed all over with sun and spray so you could barely make her out.”1 Pictorial images of the kind that originally transfixed Moore destabilize identity by turning physical objects into transitory images—light and shadow: “the thin glass or soap bubble of some sort . a nymph under the shadow of a tree or bank . you could barely make her out.”Paradoxically, straight photography, for all its geometrical clarity, calls even greater attention to the instability of the object. Straight photography was Stieglitz’s answer to Cubism in painting. While Cubist painters broke canvases into facets to depict space reveal- ing itself through time, the photographer, limited to the single perspective of the camera, had to approach space and time differently, compressing motion into the instant. Although it cannot chart an object’s evolution through time, the photograph empowers the eye to sep- arate one instant in the process of seeing, a brief interaction between artist and object that serves as a transitory still in an ever-changing relationship.The very speed necessary to cap- ture an object in clarity calls attention to its instability. Hart Crane, writing about Stieglitz in 1923, cites speed as the defining quality of photography: “Speed is at the bottom of it all, the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal” (qtd. in Sontag 65). The high speed that arrests motion also preserves it. A shutter speed that allows light to strike the film for more than one-sixtieth of a second can blur an image taken with a hand-held camera. Only the instant can be precise in a world in which subject and object exist in dynamic, on-going exchange, each shaping and being shaped by the other. Photography’s two-way relationship between artist and object distinguishes it among the visual arts. The ultimate source of a painting, engraving, or sculpture is the artist’s eye (whether the physical eye or the eye of the mind), but the physical body of the photographic model asserts its own presence in the image. Barthes calls the photograph’s model its “referent,”a title indicating that the image refers to the model rather than to the artist as its ultimate source. Unlike the objects represented in other arts, the photograph’s referent is not an “optionally real thing” but “the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (76). Challenging the hierarchy between artist and object—the photographer and the referent—composition becomes a two-way conversation. Barthes writes that as a photographic subject he “[constitutes him- self] in the process of ‘posing’” (10). In choosing a perspective from which to compose the image within the frame, the photographer, too, constitutes an identity—a pose—in relation to the referent. Although the principle of shared composition is most evident in portrait photographs—such Richard Avedon’s 1963 photograph of former slave William Casby (reproduced in Barthes’ Camera Lucida) in which the referent, Casby, like the referent in Moore’s “Blue Bug,”literal- ly looks back—any photographed object takes part in a dialogue with the photographer.The 280 English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006 lens serves as a two-way passage for sight and light between artist and referent.The photographer looks out through one side of the lens and the referent reflects light back through the other—into the camera where it strikes the eye and, at the moment that the photographer releases the shutter, the film, creating the image.

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