| The American novelist and photographer Wright Morris (1910-1998) began his prolific career in the multi-media form he dubbed "photo-text," pairing his two media on equal terms, neither taking precedence. His photographs---often confused with those of the Farm Security Administration---do not illustrate his texts, he insisted, and the texts are not captions. Photo-text, which resembles silent film in book form, is a model for recent multi-media arts. Morris produced two critically-acclaimed photo-text books in the 1940s, The Inhabitants (1946), a sequence of prose poems paired with images, and The Home Place (1948), a novel with photographs, linking documentary with fiction. When the form proved unsalable, Morris's publishers refused to continue it. But when a market developed for art photography in the late 1960s, Morris returned to photo-text, recycling earlier images to create the retrospective God's Country and My People (1968) and Love Affair: A Venetian Journal (1972), his one foray into color. Three curatorial volumes allowed him to redefine his photography, once each decade, from the 1970s through the 1990s. Meanwhile, Morris's memoirs of the 1980s acknowledged the autobiographical inspiration for his work.;This dissertation, the first book-length study of Morris's photo-texts, argues that he was engaged in a life-long autobiographical project in which photographs play a leading role, even when they are absent. It includes extensive archival and biographical research, in an effort to reassemble the missing pieces of a career that was interrupted, then resumed half a lifetime later. Although Morris has been the subject of criticism as a novelist and photographer, his photo-texts have largely evaded criticism, falling between the standard university disciplines and departments. It awaited an interdisciplinary approach for them to come into focus. I argue that understanding Morris's photography is critical to understanding his work in all its forms. Moreover, I argue that, rather than being a minor photographer of the Depression, he used its documentary style to create a form of intertextual autobiography, deploying fact and fiction in counterpoint. The larger question I address concerns the extent to which autobiography can be conducted through photographs, which typically "speak" in the third person. |
