Chapter 19 - Photography

Summary

The recent wave of visual material studies in modernist poetics warrants renewed consideration of the means by which Lowell engaged, resisted, and reflected on photographic practices. Lowell’s photographic modes vary with shifting styles and subjects. Early in his career, Lowell invokes photographs and snapshots as material artifacts in portrait and self-portrait genres. In this mode, the surface of the photograph collects descriptive details that rhetorically situate the “record of a life” as one that, Lowell insists, must be believed to be “true,” and “real,”although obviously manipulated. Photography also functions as a metaphor for putting the photographic looking “on stage” to examine different ways of seeing. In later work, epistemologies of photography become models for the action of poetic autobiography and for performances of writing. Connections between photography and poetic practice are considered in autobiographical prose and major poems in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.