Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman

Overview

Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman—were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. He intertwines these four writers’ reflections on photography with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Well Holmes and Marcus Root in America.