“In these Leaves everything is literally photographed. Nothing is poeticized”

-Whitman, 1870, discussing Leaves of Grass.

The company returns from its excursion, the darkey brings up the rear and bears the well-riddled target,

The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemmed cloth is offering mocassins and beadbags for sale,

The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with halfshut eyes bent sideways,

[…]

The pedlar sweats with his pack on his back—the purchaser higgles about the odd cent,

The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype,

The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly,

The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck

(Leaves of Grass 38)

While Whitman is moved by thought, (often grand and elevating), he does

not give the intellectual satisfaction warranted by the thought, but a moving

panorama of pictures. […] He not only puts aside his ‘singing robes’, but his

‘thinking cap’ also, and resorts to the stereopticon.

-H.M. Alden

Introduction to 1855 Leaves of Grass:

“What eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest” (9)

Introduction to 1855 Leaves of Grass:

“What eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest” (9)

“From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight … eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.” (11)

Introduction to 1855 Leaves of Grass:

“What eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest” (9)

“From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight … eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.” (11)

From “Song of Myself”:

“the unseen is proved by the seen” (27)

Introduction to 1855 Leaves of Grass:

“What eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest” (9)

“From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight … eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.” (11)

From “Song of Myself”:

“the unseen is proved by the seen” (27)

“Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask…. lie over, You light surfaces only ….I force the surfaces and the depths also.” (70)

“For a couple of krone one can have oneself photographed from every angle. The apparatus is a mechanical Know-Thyself.”

“You mean to say, the Mistake-Thyself,” said Kafka, with a faint smile. I protested: “What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!”

“Who told you that?” Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder. “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling…This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.”

--Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

This is no book, Who touches this, touches a man(Is it night? Are you alone?)It is I you hold, and who holds you,I spring from the pages into your arms

(1860 Leaves of Grass)

Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the farthest reach of the metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.

(Sontag, On Photography 13)

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;

This printed and bound book….but the printer and the printing-office boy?

The marriage estate and settlement….but the body and mind of the bridegroom?

also those of the bride?

The panorama of the sea ….but the sea itself?

The well-taken photographs….but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?

Leaves of Grass 74

... photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur [...]. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.

(Sontag, On Photography 55)

O Walt Whitman, show us some pictures;

America always Pictorial! And you Walt Whitman to name them

Yes, in a little house I keep suspended many pictures—it is not a fixed house,

It is round—Behold! it has room for America, north and south, seaboard and

inland, persons … (Pictures 8)

“Who is this, with rapid feet, curious, gay – going up and down Manahatta, through the streets, along the shores, working his way through the crowds, observant and singing?”

“Who is this, with rapid feet, curious, gay – going up and down Manahatta, through the streets, along the shores, working his way through the crowds, observant and singing?”

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,

Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

(Leaves of Grass 28)

The point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians—say of Caesar, Socrates, Epictetus, others—if we could have three or four or a half a dozen portraits—very accurate—of the men: that would be history—the best history—a history from which there would be no appeal.

-Whitman to William Brady

Carte de visite

Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.

(Sontag, On Photography, 23)

I meet new Walt Whitmans every day. There are a dozen of me afloat. I don’t know which Walt Whitman I am […] It is hard to extract a man’s real self—any man—from such a chaotic mass—from such historic debris […] Taking them in their periods is there a visible bridge from one to the other or is there a break?”

-Whitman