Wright Morris: reinventing a photographer. (Feature).

Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris

By Alan Trachtenberg, with an essay by Ralph Lieberman London: Merrell Publishers, 2002 140 pp./$50.00 (hb)

The Home Place

Wright Morris, with an introduction by John Hollander Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999 178 pp./$12.00 (sb)

Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University 

Palo Alto, California 

October 9, 2002-January 12, 2003

Joslyn Art Museum 

Omaha, Nebraska 

February 15-May 11, 2003

Pomona College Museum of Art

Pomona, California 

October 25-December 21, 2003

A writer's writer and a photographer's photographer, Wright Morris (1910-1998) was twice cursed and doubly blessed. When he is remembered, it is for his many novels--19 between 1942 and '80, earning him the National Book Award (for Field of Vision) in 1957 and the American Book Award for Fiction (for Plains Song, his last novel) in 1981--or For the apparently documentary photographs he made between 1934 and '54, commemorating structures and artifacts often associated with the Depression. But perhaps his most distinctive contribution to American arts and letters was his first: the multi-media form he adapted from the newly popular photographically illustrated magazines of the '30s to merge his two arts into one.

Morris produced two experimental "photo-texts" in the '40s: The Inhabitants (1946), a study of American character and a sidelong critique of the New Deal he fears may undermine it, in which photographs of rural American ruins appear alongside prose poems, often character sketches that sound like offstage voices; and The Home Place (1948), a homespun yet formally complex novel with photographs facing each page of text, based on the return of a native much like the author to his aunt and uncle's decrepit Nebraska farm. In both cases Morris insisted the photographs were not illustrations to his prose. Rather, they were alternatives. Together he hoped the pairings would engender a "third view" in his reader/viewers' minds. (1) These modernist, multi-media experiments--which build on, but also confound, the taste for the documentary literature and photography so prevalent at the time--resemble stilled cinema more than any other art. As novelist Charles Baxter has noted, stillness was Morris' subject, (2) notably the stillborn pioneer culture of his native Nebraska, where the homesteader's American dream was visibly in decline by the time he arrived on the scene.

To the extent The Inhabitants had peers, its large size meant they were art books as well as magazines. But the tightly cropped photographs in The Home Place typically bleed off all four sides of the page, not just two, making it look and feel much like an ordinary novel. "These mutilations removed them.., from the context of artworks... and presented them as "things" and artifacts," Morris later explained. (3) They are not photographs, his reader/viewers are asked to believe, but relics of the decayed farm itself. Remember James Agee's astonishing claim at the outset of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (his photo-text collaboration with Walker Evans first excerpted alongside a selection of Morris' "Inhabitants" in the 1940 New Directions annual), "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs. . . records of speech... phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement." (4) But The Home Place is a novel, and as such it makes different claims on the imagination, however "documentary" its style. Engaging the photo-text involves entering an epistemological relationship with the photographs as well as an aesthetic one. They attest to the reality of the fiction--a conundrum typical of Morris' obliquely autobiographical art. He is the Proust of the plains, and photographs are his madeleines, his time capsules, sometimes, inadvertently, his time bombs.

Morris planned to continue making photo-texts, but Scribner's, the only publisher he convinced to print them, insisted he drop the photographs from his 1949 sequel to The Home Place, The World in the Attic. (After publishing one last Morris novel, The Deep Sleep, in 1953, Scribner's dropped the author.) There is no reason to believe he would not have continued working in his unique multi-media form had Scribner's not alerted him to the absence of a market for his efforts. Not just The World in the Attic, but a whole series of projected photo-texts would have to be abandoned. (5) Morris continued to publish brief photo-texts in several magazines between 1948 and 1950, (6) and even proposed an unrealized photo-text volume--which would have employed other people's photographs, as well as his own--in 1953, (7) but between 1948 and '68 his books were strictly fiction, or studies of the fiction he read. (8) Apart from a reprint of The Home Place in 1968 and a second edition of The Inhabitants in 1972, both his lan dmark photo-texts were long out of print until 1999. In a fitting memorial to Morris, who died a year before, the University of Nebraska Press brought out a new edition of The Home Place, with far better photographic reproduction than their earlier reprint (though there is still room for improvement in this area), introduced by John Hollander.

Morris' photography has experienced a slow but steady revival since the market for art photography began its dramatic rise in the '70S, but his photo-texts remain a hard sell. As Michael Starenko opined in 1983 (reviewing Photographs & Words, the handsome curatorial volume in which Morris' dual media are politely kept apart) this reprint is long overdue. (9) Morris' second photographic career began in 1968 and continued through 1992, making it a few years longer than his first. The transformation his work underwent as it moved from the printed page to the gallery wall is not without parallel among photographers of his generation, who typically conceived their work for magazine and book publication, until they were "chased back to the fine arts"--as Irving Penn wryly put it--in the new era of photo galleries. (10) These exhibition venues differ radically in their aesthetics and economics, and shape the work they present accordingly.

Many welcomed the potentially lucrative shift, but few had their work so thoroughly reinvented as Morris, who began. his career a photo-text artist and emerged (in the title of John Szarkowski's catalog essay for Morris' 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) "Wright Morris the Photographer." In the late '40s it was better for him to be a novelist; by the late '70S, it was helpful to be a photographer, especially if one's work was "vintage" and had been brought up from the cellar at last. None of this altered the wisdom of. Morris' editor at Scribner's in 1949, who pointed out "the public had never taken well to the ambidextrous talent." (11) Despite a new wave of multi-media art forms that might benefit from their example, the photo-texts that were his first and formative art have been eclipsed first by the fiction, and now by the photographs from which they were made. Yet Morris' reinvention as a "straight" photographer has only scratched the surface of his archive of previously unpu blished images. If he is to be a photographer after all, Morris remains a better one than all but a few lucky viewers know. Although each new publication of his photography has expanded the number of his images in print, the amount of redundancy amongst them is notable. Latter day audiences have typically been given an increasingly polished view of Morris' photography, minus the formal experimentation he so valued in his prime.

Between 1968 and 1992, Morris would be involved in no fewer than 10 books and exhibitions, all dedicated in one way or another to reviving his now classic photography that began in the Depression. The nature of these projects, and of his involvement with them, changed significantly over these years. A brief overview may help to sketch Morris' shifting relationship to the presentation of his photography and suggest how these revivals altered or updated the work itself.

Morris' first reconsideration of his photography, the 1968 photo-text God's Country and My People--which many consider the capstone of his photo-text trilogy--was prompted by Szarkowski, who had not long since taken over from Edward Steichen as Director of the Museum of Modern Art's Photography Department. Szarkowski's original idea was to help Morris arrange a reprint of The Home Place, with an accompanying exhibition of the prints at MoMA. (MoMA had been Morris' most consistent museum sponsor, having exhibited his photographs three times before, in 1941, 1948 and [958.) As the idea grew on Morris--and after Scribner's refused to reprint the original volume--it became a new book, or what he described to Szarkowski as a new and definitive volume of "Inhabitants," with a reworked text. (12) (For Morris the term "Inhabitants" described individual photo-text pairings--which he preferred not to "lock" together once and For all--not just his book of that title.)

Something Morris had become reluctant to discuss by the time I met him in 1995 was that Szarkowski arranged for many of the prints in the new book to be made by Steichen's Former printer, Rolf (Pete) Peterson, in New York at Morris' own request. Of roughly 100 negatives proofed, were printed, one set for Morris, one for the Museum's collection. 4 rumor that haunted Morris--which I believe to be wholly undeserved--has it that he was not the best printer of his own photographs. The consummate technician he was not (he admits he didn't trust himself to develop his own film), but a study of all the available prints off his negatives demonstrates his are consistently the best. This rumor may have accounted for Morris' reluctance years later, after he had returned to what he called the "seance" of the darkroom, to admit Peterson made some of the prints for God's Country. That Peterson did indicates Morris had neither the darkroom nor the desire to do so himself. There was nothing remarkable about this arrangement at the time, indeed it was quite standard, a relic of the days before prints were commodities for sale. Under Steichen's tenure, MoMA's Photography Department had arranged printing of six of Morris' Home Place negatives in 1948, for the exhibition "In and Out f Focus." (13) Steichen's preference for large prints, perhaps larger than Morris had the facilities to make, may have accounted for this. (Morris later donated several of these prints to MoMA.)

By the '6os Morris' photographs, which tend to depict arti-Facts, had become artifacts themselves, objects of memory. The subject of his revision of The Inhabitants is the passage of. time, as revealed by the uncanny resistance of his photographs to his own aging and to the concurrent disappearance of many of the objects they depict. The objects he had "salvaged"--a favorite word to describe his photographic intentions--in the '405, many of them relics of the landscape f his childhood, were now gone for good, lie fancied; only the photographs remained. (In many cases this fancy is belied by the facts, including the removal of the Home Place farm itself--of which he assured me not a stick was left--across and down the streetl) For a man whose mother died when he was born, and who had very little contact with his remaining Family and his home place as an adult, the pictures themselves became a surrogate home, with all the complexity of a real" one. The shifting and unidentified narrative voice of The Inhabitan ts, which began as a letter to Thoreau, in God's Country becomes more straightforward first-person autobiographical reminiscence. Like Morris' memoirs of the '80s, which quote heavily from the novels he'd always insisted were not autobiographical, this dramatic shift has the effect of calling into question the earlier work, explaining and estranging it at once. If Morris is the Proust of the plains, God's Country is his Time Regained, the last installment of his three-volume dramatization of the way memory resides in things. In things--for Proust it would be friends--we watch our own mortality, as they decay before our eyes. Photography is a time art, and time's passage is always its unwitting subject. Yet, as Morris knew better than most, photographic 'truths" are inventions not so different from fictions. Like The Inhabitants, God's Country is a scrap-book of impressions, but its subject is no longer the young man's cross-country "photo-safari," but the middle-aged man's recollected past. The context of the Depression--which Morris deemed a triumph of photography, intimating it could never have occurred without the concerted efforts. of the Farm Security Administration--was long gone, and so are his veiled polemics against the New Deal. (14)

Reprints of Morris' two earlier photo-texts swiftly followed God's Country--The Home Place from the University of Nebraska Press in 1968 (15) and The Inhabitants from Da Capo Press in 1972, with a new introduction by Morris and two photographs replaced where the originals could not be found. Nebraska also brought out a paperback of God's Country in 1981. So the early '70s was the last and only time all of Morris' photo-texts were available in print at once.

The year 1972 marked not only the reissue of The Inhabitants, but also the appearance of Morris one color photo-text--and the only photographic project of his later years not to recycle earlier imagery: Love Affair: A Venetian Journal. Time has not been kind to this project, which feels like a vacation from the concerns of Morris' classic American photo-fiction. The color photographs were excluded from both his subsequent retrospectives--in part because they were color, and 35mm at that, but chiefly because they are not what viewers have come to expect from Morris. (His non-Nebraska fiction also tends to fall by the wayside.) In fact Italy plays a key role in the development of his art--but that is another story. The Venetian pictures are not his best, but the book is coherent and engaging. Very much a scrapbook, its subject too is the passage of time, in a place where time is made of stone slowly slipping underwater. But when the time frame involves centuries, snapshots can seem trite. That same year, durin g a term spent teaching at Princeton, Morris made a few prints of his older black-and-white negatives in a darkroom made available by his colleague Peter Bunnell, but deemed it would be "a distraction" from his fiction to continue. (16)

Despite his arrangement with MoMA, it is clear in retrospect Morris had vintage prints of many of these negatives already, though it is hard to say how many, or how accessible they were. Only 32 of the images Peterson reprinted were used in God's Country. Unless Morris hired another printer, the rest of the 84 prints used in that volume must have been culled from vintage ones he had on hand. Instead of favoring these earlier prints, as today's art market would indicate, he evidently tried hard to avoid using them, at least until he was in the thick of reassessing his photographic archive. Thirty-four of the 84 images in God's County were new to that volume (17); the remaining 50 being repeats from Morris' earlier two photo-texts. Of these "new" images, only two were printed by Peterson. Evidently the twist this project had taken sent Morris back to his files.

The reprinting began again a few years later in preparation for Morris' first retrospective, at the University of Nebraska's Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln in 1975, during a term he spent as novelist-in-residence. James Alinder, who was in charge of the University's photography program, was commissioned by Gallery director Norman Geske to make new prints from Morris' negatives--proofing some 300 in all, of which roughly 200 were printed and exhibited. A hundred of these were published in the exhibition's catalog, Structures and Artifacts--Morris' first text-free book of photographs (apart from an interview with Alinder at the end). Thirty-seven of the images illustrated had not been published in any of Morris' photo-text volumes. (18) Peterson's prints, were not considered for exhibition, but vintage Morris prints were again available to fill in among Alinder's prints as necessary. (19) A smaller version of the exhibition traveled to a dozen mostly Midwestern venues, ending in 1977 at the San Franci sco Museum of Modern Art.

Morris seems to have approached both these revivals as new beginnings, going back to his archive of some 1500 negatives to see what he had done. Certainly he may have welcomed the opportunity to have additional prints made, but that alone does not explain his recurrent enthusiasm for the project. It seems fanciful, yet plausible that he may have needed to see his photographs made new each time to affirm their ongoing presence in the face of his own changes and a rapidly changing world. Morris loved to retell stories he had already told, frequently baffling his readers (and interviewers) with multiple versions of the same tale; perhaps this was his way of keeping his photographs alive, making sure these unchanging "facts" of his vagabond life remained in alignment with his shifting relationship to them. At this point in his life, this was of necessity a collaborative process. It is an index of the art world of the time that no one--last of all the photographer--objected to substituting contemporary prints for Morris' own.

A few of Alinder's prints went on the art market; in 1977 and '78 New York's Prakapas Gallery mounted shows of Morris photographs using Alinder's prints. Perhaps as a result, the prominent New York photography dealer Lee Witkin proposed publishing a limited edition portfolio of a dozen of Morris' best-known images, probably in 1979. In preparation, a darkroom was installed' in the 'basement of Morris' small Mann County home. There was no question who would make these prints. Morris may have had some help from Alinder, who had moved to California to become Director of the Friends of Photography, reacquainting himself with darkroom practice and learning the new printing papers, in the absence of his beloved silver-rich Velour Black. Agfa Portriga was his new choice--a warm tone befitting the softness of recollected imagery. The Witkin-Berley portfolio, published in 1981, included 12 images in an edition of 50. Morris made additional prints of these, and of many others negatives he did not edition. These later prints have been available in several galleries across the country since. They differ dramatically from his vintage ones, sold by a single San Francisco dealer for a substantially higher price. In addition to being warm-toned, the modern prints are typically softer in contrast than Morris' sunshot early ones, which are ferrotyped to a high gloss. With the exception of the dry-mounted portfolio prints, they are' printed with a narrow white border all around, whereas his early prints are often borderless.

Morris' new prints were also the basis for the lavish volume Alinder edited and had the Friends of Photography publish in 1982, Photographs & Words, which persuaded a new audience Morris was a serious photographer. Clearly envisioned as the capstone to a now classic career, Photographs 8 Words included only eight images not found in previous volumes of Morris' photography among the 61 it reproduced. It is heavy on images from the Home Place farm, the heart and soul of Morris' photographic work. A surprising number of these, including "Eggs in Pot, Home Place 1947," "Reflection in Oval Mirror, Home Place 1947," "Front Door, Home Place 1947," Rocker, Home Place 1947," "Bedroom, Home Place 1947," "Comb on Dresser, Home Place 1947" and "Model T in Shed, Home Place 1947" (plates 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 19 and 22 in Photographs & Words)--all standards in Morris' later photographic publications--are not in The Home Place, though several debuted in God's Country.

On the end-papers of his subsequent volumes, Photographs & Words is listed as Morris' fifth and final photo-text, but it is a radically different venture than any that came before, having more in common with the museum retrospectives of his later years than with the earlier volumes it commemorates. Images and text are kept to their respective corners where they cannot interact, with the exception of two photographs in Morris' essay, "Photography in My Life," of two-page spreads from The Inhabitants and The Home Place, where the balance of photographs and words is quite different. The photographs are no longer bled, but printed full-frame. Morris' note at the end of The Home Place, thanking its printer, Atkinson Dymock, attests he felt the cropping often worked to that book's advantage--but Photographs & Words makes clear the degree to which the images were compromised. In the photo-text, the photographs were to feel no different, on the surface, from type; to drive this point home, several even show type as their principal subject. These photographs have seldom, if ever, been reprinted; they do not suit the new context. Similarly, it is possible the images Morris later settled on as favorites from this project may not have fit smoothly into his text at the time.

Morris was certainly not blind to the gallery potential of his photography. He had a handful of shows in the '40s and 50s (20) and even wrote Geske he looked forward to the Sheldon retrospective since his photographs are not at their best in the format of a book, where they cannot escape the context of illustrations. (21) This should not be taken as the end of his interest in photo-text, only a realization of its difficulty finding an audience. It may also announce a shift in his interest from presenting "the thing itself" via the seemingly transparent mediation of photography to presenting that tangible if fragile thing, the photographic print.

Even though Morris had resumed the seance of the darkroom, Photographs & Words inevitably remained a collaboration, which could not have happened without much outside help; Alinder's was doubtless instrumental. Another partner in this project--and in all Morris' photographic revivals--was his second wife, Josephine, his partner in all ventures from the '60s on. A former art dealer, she was an astute watcher of the art market, and doubtless noted the rising fortunes of photography, particularly "vintage" photography, in the '70s. Immediately after the Sheldon show in 1975, Morris gave serious thought to selling his entire photographic archive, negatives and all, to that museum; much that followed could not have happened if he had. Witkin evidently persuaded him that if his prints were to sell, they must be his. Prior to 1980 it seems Morris' attitude toward prints of his photographs was more functional, as befit his experience in publishing. Photographic prints for publication are destined for yet another pri nter, from whom they don't always return unscathed. In the decades following Photographs & Words Josephine Morris acted as her husband's principal dealer, supplying galleries and museums with his later prints. With its handsome laser-scanned duotone prints, Photographs & Words became something of a catalog of prints available in modern renditions--though not a complete one.

The text in this volume, an engaging essay from which Morris borrowed heavily in his third and final volume of memoirs (Cloak of Light, 1985) is his longest and most complete account of his photographic career, a career he clearly assumes is over. In 1989 Aperture collected his essays on photography, many of them written in the '80s, under the heading. Time Pieces (including three previously unpublished Morris photographs among the handful it reproduces). That Morris spent much of his last productive decade, the '80s, writing his memoirs and reevaluating his photographs, and 'the role of photographs in his imaginative life, hardly seems coincidental. Photography was for him an autobiographical act--but none of his autobiographical expressions is straightforward. By this late point in his life, it had become quite evident to Morris that photographs are time capsules, and he was an advocate--disingenuously enough--for an artless photography, with little patience for the art world's newfound love of photography from which he was benefiting. "I prefer a taken to a made photograph," he told a Chicago television interviewer in 1975; Solomon Butcher, the nineteenth-century Nebraska photographer of pioneer households (complete with mules and two-headed dogs) became his ideal. That Morris' own photography, like his writing, insinuated itself with considerable artistry into the vernacular culture he revered was a matter he preferred not to discuss.

The title "Time Pieces" was also used for a small show of Morris' prints at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1983, curated by Mark Power. In the slender accompanying catalog, reproductions of 14 Home Place photographs accompany texts from God's Country, creating a miniature photo-text as a memento of the exhibition. Power also had Morris hand-write a text on the mat for each print.

But the final exhibition of Morris' photography during his lifetime was the most significant, at least in terms of institutional prestige. In 1992 curator Sandra Phillips mounted a Morris retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which traveled to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Yale University Art Gallery), entitled "Origin of a Species." The first exhibition of Morris' since he ceased being active as a photographer to mount vintage prints made when he was, this signaled a further departure from previous notions of print quality suitable for exhibition. The catalog--which reproduces of the 8o images in the show, with o more Morris images illustrating scholarly essays by Phillips and Szarkowski--adds another 19 to the annals of Morris' photographs published in book form, including two early snapshots, but the opportunity the decision to show vintage prints afforded to exhibit more unpublished work was clearly not a high priority.

Morris insisted on hanging panels of text among the photographs, despite both his wife's and the curator's insistence that more photographs could be accommodated if he would abandon this idea. (22) At 82 he must have known this was the last major exhibition of his work he could shape, and he was clearly more concerned with the appropriate translation of his unique art form into the gallery than he was with showing new work or boosting print sales. In the 1975 television interview cited above, he said he was proud he no longer photographed, since there are too many photographs in the world. At this last moment in his second photographic career, it became his distinction not to photograph (or to print). Abstaining from further. photographic activity helped him acknowledge the photographs that were the facts of his life. By this time he had stopped writing, and was engaged in the process he liked to call "turning off the tap."

But Morris remained alive to new possibilities for his photographs until the end of his long life. When I met him in 1995, he was busy, he told me excitedly, helping prepare what he called "the digitized Morris," a CD-ROM version of his photo-texts inspired by an interactive video component of "Origin of a Species." "I've spent my whole life trying to combine these two media," he told me, thrilled to have discovered a new way it could be done. Students in the Master's program in Multi-Media Studies at San Francisco State, where Morris taught creative writing from 1962 through 1975, interviewed him and taped him reading passages from his photo-texts. (23) The recordings would be activated as voice-over narration when a viewer clicked on a photograph on a computer. I remarked on the difference it would make having his fine aged voice reading the young man's prose, as if Lear were to play Hamlet for a night. "I need no coaxing in the qualities of a voice," the novelist gruffly replied. The CD-ROM version of Mor ris' photo-texts is an idea worth pursuing; it may be the only one among his photographic revivals to approach the photo-texts on their own terms, even as the passage of time, audible in Morris' voice, places this among his mature acts of self-reflexive autobiography. (24) Issues of print connoisseur-ship are set aside, and for the first time photographs and text are simultaneous experiences, occurring in the same time frame. "If anyone was ever invented for this ridiculous piece of machinery, I'm the one," Morris ad libs in the recorded kiosk program that was the pilot for this project, conceived by Peter Samis of SFMoMA and developed by Luong Tam for the latter two installations of "Origin of a Species." (25) Unfortunately, "the digitized Morris" never saw the light of day.

For Morris, writing and photography were creatively and structurally at odds. That is what makes their pairing dynamic. "The secret of my photo-texts is that I do both," he told me. When I asked if he thought of himself as a photographer, back when he was actively using a view camera, he said no. "What I was doing was oh so much more important to me than photography."

The first show of Morris' photography since his death opened this fall at Stanford's Cantor Center for. the Visual Arts; it travels to two of his early haunts, Omaha and Pomona, next year. The 76 prints--all of which are reproduced in the catalog, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris, from British publisher Merrell (distributed by Rizzoli in the U.S.)--were selected from a group of later Morris prints by Joel Leivick, formerly curator of photography at the Stanford Museum of Art (now the Cantor Center), on behalf of The Capital Group for its corporate collection. The images have been sequenced in the catalog by historian of photography Alan Trachtenberg, who provides an insightful introduction to Morris' photo-fiction. Bernard Barryte, the Cantor Center's chief curator, supervised the project--which, for all its merits, unfortunately shows the signs of a few too many cooks.

To a specialist, or anyone following the ongoing drama of Morris' photographic revival, the strength of this show is that it affords the most thorough view to date of the reprinting he did in preparation for the Witkin-Berley portfolio and Photographs & Words. Given the several instances in which rival printings of the same negative are displayed side by side, and the additional cases in which alternates to well-known images are used, often alongside their better known siblings, the exhibition's organizers surely must be aware they are offering a unique opportunity to return to the darkroom with Morris and watch him reinhabit his work. So the discrepancies in the dating of these prints, as reported at several points in the volume, are surprising, to say the least. The difference between the dates given in the Director's Foreword (19781980) and just before the plates (1979-1982) is slight enough. Josephine Morris told me 1978-1981; presumably she was the source for all three sets of dates, so any might be cor rect. More disturbing by far, photographer and art historian Ralph Lieberman, who writes an eloquent appreciation of Morris' ambidextrous art, seems not to have been told these are Morris' prints--or that Morris reprinted his work at all. After repeating the old saw about Morris' failings as a printer, he proceeds to distinguish between these prints, which he must take for vintage ones (apparently he hadn't seen the originals when writing, his essay being a late inclusion in the volume) and those in Photographs & Words, which he considers definitive, and believes to have been made by Alinder. Sadly, Josephine Morris died while this book was in production. That these errors weren't corrected leaves one unsure those left in charge know the context of this work. These are only the most salient examples.

Several of the pairings force the question. Twin versions of Morris' often-reproduced "House in Winter, near Lincoln Nebraska," usually dated to 1941, appear side by side, one dated as usual, the other to 1940. Evidently this is how they arrived in Palo Alto; certainly it is not the only instance of a discrepancy in the dating of Morris' photographs. (The many photographs he made in Cahow's barbershop in Chapman, Nebraska--where Morris is buried alongside his mother--vacillate between 1942 and 1947, depending on the volume in which they appear. Morris' popular-photograph of a "Juke Box," said to have been made in southern Indiana in 1950, appears in his New York Times Magazine layout of April 24, 1949.) Clearly the two prints of "House in Winter" are made from the same negative. Both dates cannot be correct. Correcting one would seem to be in order--but which one? Since every other known appearance of this image dates it to 1941, this seems straightforward enough. It came as a genuine shock to me to learn th e real reason these images were both illustrated in the catalog is that one print is larger than the other. This is surely not apparent in the catalog, where none of the photographs is reproduced at actual size (though most--unlike these two--are reproduced at the same size). It is unusual for Morris to have printed larger than 8" x 10"--if he made these prints. (Alinder made several larger prints for the Sheldon show.)

Other pairings of seemingly identical prints prove more revealing of Morris' working process. Two versions of the famous "Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas 1940" show the contrast adjustment required to make this beacon on the plains blindingly bright; with its papery white exterior burned in and wrinkling, it isn't half as imposing. Two versions of "Front Room Reflected in Mirror, The Home Place 1947"--again at different sizes, according to a note on the plates, though this time they are reproduced at the same size--show, in addition to slight differences in cropping and contrast, a real difference in handling the largest of the many family photographs on display. Small portraits, presumably of children, line the parlor table; a heavy framed portrait of a middle-aged couple, perhaps Harry or Clara's parents, hangs on the wall. In one version this round-framed photograph is burned in to deep shadow, in the other it is bright. Compare these to other published versions of this image (which leads off each cha pter of the novel Plains Song) and you see Morris' choice was closer to the darker one, a conscious decision to downplay these elder relatives who watch over the scene, as if to mark their passing. If the version in Photographs & Words is taken as definitive, both are steps along the way.

In four other cases, closely related alternates are paired, allowing us to follow Morris' habits of-framing and refraining a subject. Some are more revealing than others. The well-known photograph here titled "Model T Ford and photographer, at Ed's Place 1947," a regular in later Morris volumes (though it appears in none of the photo-texts), in which the shadow of the photographer's head and view camera are visible at the bottom, is shown alongside a previously unpublished variant without his shadow. The camera has been moved slightly, but the sun has moved more. It is hard to say which came first, but easy to say which Morris preferred when he began to reassess his work. Similarly, the classic "Dresser Drawer, Ed's Place 1947," showing the private effects of Clara's recently deceased bachelor relation who lives across the street in The Home Place, appears alongside an alternate where a pack of family snapshots, scattered atop the dresser in the standard version, have yet to be removed from an envelope in th e drawer. Some may be alarmed at the photographer's license--especially given the discussions of privacy that often accompany this photograph--but it is clear the "altered" version is the stronger one.

There are many other instances in this show where alternates of classic Morris images appear alone, inviting comparison to companion pieces in other books. Sometimes the results can be revealing, as in the case of this version of "Bedroom Dresser, Southern Indiana 1950," a sidelong view of the site of one of Morris' last and best black-and-white photographs (plate 59 in Photographs & Words, where it is called "Dresser and Mirror, Southern Indiana 1950"). Who would have known from that far more vibrant framing of this domestic interior that the tiny nail barely visible among the cracks on the plaster wall once held the framed snapshot of the young woman Morris evidently placed on the dresser? Here that picture--barely visible--is on the wall. A close-up of "Bandstand, Liberty, Nebraska 1947," in which one sees the silhouettes of men lounging in the shadows underneath this pavilion of liberty at the unpaved center of a small town, is far more compelling than the long shot which appears in The Home Place and la ter volumes. Did Morris perhaps consider this version too intimate? Having seen it, the omission seems revealing. And here at last is the version of the well-known interior of the "Barber Shop, Weeping Water, Nebraska 1947" Morris must have had in mind when he wrote the essay for Photographs & Words. The photographer is visible in the mirror, as he attests, appropriately blurred. The version reproduced in that book doesn't show him at all. Instead, an old man cranes his neck as if to peer out of the mirror, no doubt wondering where the young fellow went. This seems a typical Morris gag; at least one scholar, tired of looking for the hidden photographer, has taken it as an example of his mischievous sleight of hand. (26)

Given that 42 of the 76 photographs in this volume also appear in Photographs 9 Words (a bit less tightly cropped there, with very few exceptions), the highlight of Distinctly American, for those who know Morris' work, will be the photographs not reproduced before. There are 14 in all, plus nine alternates to previously published images. (For those new to Morris, despite the excellent essays, this may be a confounding introduction, given its involvement-however unspoken-in the history of his photography's presentation.) These include a striking shot from Morris' first year with the view camera of beach houses and a beached boat on Cape Cod, "Boat, Cape Cod, Massachusetts 1939"; a dark view of the "Adobe Church, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico 1940," swallows the viewer in its shadowy foreground; the horse-drawn "Wagon, The Home Place 1947," which--mazingly enough-may have been too old fashioned for that book about the fate of early pre-fabricated technology; two still lifes Morris may have made as memorials to hi s father, then recently deceased, a railroad station agent in their early Nebraska days: "Desk in Train Depot," showing the tools of communication and solitude, telephone, telegraph and ashtray; and "Old Photographs of Train Depot and Portraits, Nebraska 1947." Another still life, "Starfish and Portraits, Cleveland, Ohio 1940," was clearly made in the home of Morris' first wife Mary Ellen's parents, judging by the location, the family name on a letter and the grandmother's framed portrait (Morris' own portrait of Grandmother Finfrock appears in one of his newspaper layouts). This fearfully ordered home inspired those novels of suburban desperation, Man and Boy (1951) and The Deep Sleep (1953). Trachtenberg reads it as an announcement of photography's marriage to writing, but it could be another sort of autobiography as well.

What is interesting about the gift of these new images is how quickly they become familiar "Morris shots"--as he himself referred to his photographs. Surely that is evidence the photographs can stand alone, though they remain inextricably part of his complex, intertextual project, whose shape only becomes discernible at the end of his life. Are these images from unrealized photo-texts, or out-takes? (It is unclear whether Morris produced photographs for The World in the Attic-he may well have done.) Either way, it is great to see them at last. Given Josephine Morris' forthcoming bequests to several museums, the best part is there is more to come.

NOTES

(1.) Wright Morris, "The Inhabitants" in James Laughlin, ed., New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1940 (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940), p. 147. Morris' first publication, a selection of photo-text pairs, was introduced by his first published statement on his multi-media form, a heady manifesto.

(2.) Charles Baxter, "Stillness" in DoubleTake (Spring 1996), pp. 85-91 Baxter also writes the introduction to the University of Nebraska Press' 2000 reissue of Plains Song.

(3.) Wright Morris, "Photography in My Life" in Photographs & Words (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1982), p. 48.

(4.) James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 13.

(5.) Initially Morris envisioned The Inhabitants as the first in "a series, each dealing with a phase of our national life as I had experienced it. Rural, small town, urban, and the open road." (Photographs & Words, p. 20) When he rediscovered "the home place" in 1942, he added it to his plan: "the farm at Norfolk would be the point of origin." (Photographs & Words, p. 42). After the publication of The Home Place, Morris seems to have favored this more personal tangent, making The World in the Attic "the second in a series of photo-text books I had planned." (Photographs & Words, p. 49). What those plans had become we won't know.

(6.) Morris' photographic publications in magazines as of 1948 include: a five page spread (pp. 24-28)--not listed on any Morris bibliography--in the March 1948 issue of the German periodical Du ('Vier Photos aus Amerika von Wright Morris"); excerpts from The Home Place in The New York Times Magazine and Life which appeared at the time of its publication in the summer of 1948; four more two-page photo-texts Morris did on commission for Times Magazine in 1949 and '50; excerpts from The Home Place and from the projected photo-text The World in the Attic in the British periodical Photography, both in 1949 (the latter of which may afford a glimpse of Morris' planned layout for his aborted photo-text); 2.4 photographs in The Nation's Heritage in 1943; a single photograph in US. Camera Annual, 19.49; and an otherwise unknown portrait of Uncle Harry--also absent from Morris bibliographies--on page 81 of the September 1950 issue of coroner (in the "picture story" entitled "The Simple Life," pp. 69-84). Many of the ph otographs in these periodicals appear nowhere else in print.

After 1950, Morris continued writing for magazines, but without photographs. In November 1961, his article "Conversations in a Small Town"--describing a disillusioning visit he made to his hometown of Central City, Nebraska--appeared in Holiday with nondescript historic photographs, not his own. The three elegant and funny articles Morris wrote for Holiday in 1958 and 1959--"Our Endless Plains," "The Cars in My Life" and "Mexican journey"--might also have been accompanied by the author's own photographs, had he and his editors been so inclined. Clearly they were not.

(7.) Morris' unsuccessful application for a third Guggenheim fellowship in 1953 requested funding for "The Rites of Spring: A photo-text project." A considerably transformed version, without photographs, would become "The Captivity" narrative in his 1954 novel The Huge Season(reprinted in Black Sparrow Press' 1995 Morris collection, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer). Although it has no photographs, The Huge Season alternates, not unlike a photo-text, between two frames of time. Morris received Guggenheim fellowships in 1942, 1946 and 1954; the first two funded his photo-texts.

(8.) Not coincidentally, these are the years of his major novels, on which his reputation as a fiction writer rests. Morris' first volume of essays (on American fiction), The Territory Ahead, was published in 1958.

(9.) Michael Starenko, "Of Fast Friends and Odd Couples" in Afterimage 10, no. 8 (March, 1983), pp. 6-8. Starenko suggests all three Morris phototexts, including God's country and My People (1968), be reissued in a set.

(10.) John Szarkowski, Irving Penn (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Boston: New Graphic Society, 1984).

(11.) Wright Morris, A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 144.

(12.) Wright Morris to john Szarkowski, October 1, 1966. I am grateful to John Szarkowski for sharing this correspondence with me, and to Virginia Dodier and Sarah Hermanson in the Photography Department's Study Center for assistance understanding MoMA's Morris collection.

(13.) Loan receipt, Museum of Modern Art, April 1, 1948.

(14.) "That period we refer to as the Great Depression is largely a photographic triumph." Wright Morris, "The Camera Eye" in Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory (New York Aperture, 1989), p. 14.

(15.) Despite the preparations at MoMA, plates for Nebraska's Home Place reprint were shot off the first edition.

(16.) Wright Morris, "Photography In My Life" in Photographs & Words, p. 52.

(17.) Several appear in the periodical publications mentioned in note 6 above.

(18.) According to the exhibition checklist in the catalog, another 45 previously unpublished photographs were exhibited. From their titles it is clear several were published in subsequent volumes of Morris' photography, but it is impossible to say how many since the Sheldon, unlike MoMA, unfortunately did not retain a duplicate set of prints.

(19.) The exhibition catalog lists which of the photographs in the show were used in each photo-text, and which images were then believed to exist only in a unique vintage print, the negative lost. Curiously, negatives for many of Morris' favorite Home Place images, which he reprinted a few years later, are listed as missing in 1975. Evidently they reappeared in the interim.

(20.) Most are noted on available bibliographies, but at least one is not: "Photographs by Wright Morris," mounted by the University of Nebraska Art Galleries (later the Sheldon Memorial Gallery of Art) in its 1947-48 season. This loan exhibition reached the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May 1951 and may have had other venues. Surviving literature describes it as an exhibition of photographs from The Inhabitants and The Home Place, but the photograph reproduced in a Tulsa Daily World review on Sunday May 13,1951 is not in either book, though it is in God's Country and My People.

(21.) Wright Morris to Norman Geske, September 7,1974.

(22.) Interview with Josephine Morris, February 1998. The catalog mimics this display, with pages of text inserted.

(23.) Cathy Neuren appears to have been the most active of the group of four. I am grateful to her for sharing her work on this project with me. John McLeod, of Opportune Press, was the project's sponsor and producer. It is unclear why the project did not go forward, but it appears to have been his decision.

(24.) The two-part video documentary, "Wright Morris: Repossession" made by Nebraska Educational Television on the occasion of Morris' 1975 stay in Lincoln accomplishes some of the same goals, with Morris reading passages from his photo-texts as the camera studies the photographs.

(25.) A prototype of the Museum kiosk program can be seen on the website of Luong Tam Designs: http://www.ltdnet.com/ltdhtml/wmoo1.htm.

(26.) Timothy Dow Adams, "The Mirror Without a Memory: Wright Morris" in Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 193.

STEPHEN LONGMIRE is a photographer and a writer on photographic art. He is competing a study of Wright Morris' photo-texts and of the role of photography in Morris' work.