Writing with Light

The Editor: Mick Gidley is Emeritus Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds. He has taught at universities in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and in 2005 was the William Robertson Coe Distinguished Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Wyoming. He has been awarded fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, grants by bodies such as the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust, and a life-time Honorary Fellowship by the British Association for American Studies. Widely published in American literary and cultural history, he has written extensively on Native American themes, including three books on Edward S. Curtis. His other publications include essays on Richard Avedon, E. O. Hoppé and Native American photography.

• Contents: Mick Gidley: Writing with Light: An Introduction – Clive Sinclair: Feminizing the West – Martin Padget: Native Americans, the Photobook and the Southwest: Ansel Adams’s and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo – Anna Woodhouse: ‘An Ethics of Seeing’ in Sontag’s On Photography and Weegee’s Naked City – Caroline Blinder: The Bachelor’s Drawer: Art and Artefact in the Work of Wright Morris – Beth Bennett: Shooting Slavery’s Image in Black Power: A Close Reading of Three Richard Wright Photographs – Neil Campbell: Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac: ‘You got eyes’ – Eric J. Sandeen: Picturing Colorado: Robert Adams and the Myth of the Frontier – Shamoon Zamir: The Image in the Archive: Gerald Vizenor’s The People Named the Chippewa – Diane Morgan: Activating and Acting On The Past: The Experience of History in August Sander’s and Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance – Andrew Stafford: My Favourite Piccies: Sequencing, Structuring and Essayism in Photo-Anthologies by Szarkowski, Debray and Roche – Francisca D. Fuentes: Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train: The Photobook as Memory Text – Katharine Burkitt: Frozen Moments: The Motif of the Photograph in Works by Anne Carson and Michael Ondaatje – Mick Gidley: Shadowing Indians, Catching Curtis - with Autobiographical Asides.

«As a whole, the collection reflects two benefits of its conference origins. It presents British scholarship on American culture and photography by academics at different stages in professional life: from graduate students in the dissertation phase up to senior faculty with significant published research in these fields. And current discourses in the humanities are well-represented through the variety of approaches to photography, taken in relation to history, aesthetic theory, memory, gender, media, ethnic and political identity, and national culture.» (James Goodwin, Visual Resources)