Comments on: The Anxiety of the Blank Page (or Screen) … and a Contrasting Image

By: mns

mns — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:39:07 +0000

I really love this post, Gary, even though I have come to like Whitman’s full-hipped images better than his codpiece image in my ongoing quest for the womanly Whitman. I have a bunch of quick thoughts to throw out: though WW’s representations of the working man, and lord knows of the slave, seem forced and stilted sometimes, still when I think of him next to, say, his near-contemporary Wordsworth’s representation of the same, I can appreciate the “authenticity” of what he tries to do– and of what he was, since despite his (tortured) attempt to pose as one, after all he IS a working man, undereducated, poor, itinerant. The other thing I was thinking about reading this post is a subject that is never far from my mind when I read WW: audience and purpose. Who is the audience for White’s photo and what purpose did it serve for him, his family (vs. for you now)? That seems so different to me than the purpose and (projected enormous) audience of the frontispiece that it complicates a comparison.

I feel suddenly like I’m defending the codpiece image, which actually I’ve never liked much and always found fakey and artificial! I hope you blog more about the sheer number of images, Gary, which also has so many interesting implications for “commonness,” geography, public image, and so on.

By: garyrichards

garyrichards — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:39:39 +0000

Thanks to Brady, Matt, and Jim for responding. I’m still figuring out how to handle approvals and responses, so thanks as well for bearing with me.
I appreciate the welcome, Matt. I think you nicely remind that all images have degrees of posedness and certainly constructedness (even if the one you draw us to–Whitman and the butterfly–goes to an extreme!), and I hope my scare quotes indicated my questioning of the “realness” in the case of White and his photograph. He’s no doubt as posed as Whitman, although perhaps there’s an immediacy or spontaneity that’s missing in Whitman’s. And I do still worry that there’s a disjunct between his performance of “common manness” and the day-to-day lived experiences of common men and women of the era. Perhaps a question for me is how does one capture that embodied experience imagistically, if one ever can? Or is that labor to some extent antithetical to representation?
Brady, I have no idea if my great-great-grandfather enhanced his crotch as well, but his fathering of fifteen children may be an indirect comment. That’s fascinating about Whitman and his potential manipulation of imagery, and it definitely adds to the uneasiness that I unexpectedly felt about this particular image this time around.

By: Song of the bava, a frontispiece at bavatuesdays

Song of the bava, a frontispiece at bavatuesdays — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:01:49 +0000

[…] that are fragmented and often weighty in their incongruity and dissonance. In fact, after reading Gary Richard’s post that provocatively frames Whitman as a poser in the frontispiece (in the perjorative, rather than […]

By: Matthew Gold

Matthew Gold — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:38:13 +0000

Great post, Gary, and welcome to the project! The subject of Whitman and photography is what first drew me to start doing serious research on Whitman way back in my first year of grad school. There is much to say on the subject, but for now I'll just note that your point about Whitman's poses is right on. The "butterfly" photograph is perhaps the best example of that. See the Whitman Archive notes for the full story behind that photo. I guess that what this brings up for me is the question of authenticity as it relates to posing. Is a pose, or artifice of any kind, necessarily inauthentic because it is consciously constructed? And is an artless pose necessarily more "real" than an artful one? It seems to me that the wonder of Whitman is that he was able to complicate all of these categories.

By: Brady

Brady — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:19:32 +0000

I think you’re onto something about Whitman’s carefully managed casualness. There’s a fascinating article by Ted Genoways (in the book _Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays_, which you can get to on NetLibrary through our library) called “One Goodshaped and Wellhung Man” (a phrase from the 1855 preface–I kid you not) that presents pretty convincing evidence that Whitman actually met with his engraver to have the crotch of the image accentuated in later printings of the book. When it came to pictures, it seems, he left little to chance.