The photographer's eye: Henry James and the American scene

Abstract

It is little disputed that the invention of photography had a pervasive, jarring impact on society and culture during the years following its introduction to the world. The influence of the medium on visual artists has already been widely discussed, but study of its literary consequences has only recently begun. Photography did not go unnoticed by writers; commentary on the revolutionary medium appears frequently in journal entries, letters, essays, and fiction. Writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Holmes, and Baudelaire responded to it with both delight and anger, lucidity and confusion. Occasionally, even, a writer such as Emile Zola took up the camera himself and made pictures, but the closest that most writers came to photographing was through their mode of writing - their journalism, travel literature, and realist fiction¹.