7 - DeLillo’s Photo Opportunity

Summary

I don't think any attempt to understand the way we live and the way we think and the way we feel about ourselves can proceed without a deep consideration of the power of the image. (DePietro 125)

Conventionally speaking, a photo opportunity is an arranged event that assembles notable figures to have their picture taken. Arrangement, as a formal precondition of ekphrastic writing, empowers an author to correlate visual and linguistic forms in order to represent the effects of a non-discursive medium such as photography. Across his body of work, Don DeLillo uses narrative to investigate the ‘power of the image’ in contemporary culture, and specifically, the pervasive and complex influence of photography on ‘the way we feel about ourselves’. This chapter examines how and why DeLillo turns to photography to pose questions about subjective freedom, perceptual and affective experience, as well as collective trauma. Using language to mediate the prerogative of the image, DeLillo effectively controls its reception. His ekphrastic writing presents, describes and frames multiple features of photography, including the photographer and her subject, the site of photography, the image and its circulation, and finally, the viewer’s, and thus reader’s, experience of the picture. With this comprehensive scope, DeLillo's novels at once introduce and govern photography using the medium of language. This tension, in turn, reflects the author's deep ambivalence about the power of photography, an ambivalence that I argue is inherent to the medium itself.

The history of photography theory is anchored in the question of whether and what makes photography art. Both the indexicality and the unintentionality of the effects inherent to photography have led some critics to argue that it falls outside the traditional realm of art because it is neither an entirely made-up object independent of the world, nor an image completely controlled by its maker. Alternatively, photography theorists suggest that it is precisely these differences that define the mediumspecificity, and therefore legitimate the singular aesthetic category of photography as an art form. Added to these formal arguments is the fact that, while there have been many influential artists who work in photography, the photograph and picturetaking as such remain largely co-opted by the contemporary visual regime, which circulates images for the purposes of commodification, media communications, and individual and corporate self-promotion.