In the process of compiling and revising his life's work in the so-called New York Edition, the novelist Henry James paused to comment on the relation between the established arts and photography. His verdict? He imagines their encounter as a competition in which the popular practice of photography displaces the fine art of literary description as well as traditional visual art forms like painting and illustration. In other words, in a battle of the arts and media, photography is always going to win.

Is this true? Our seminar explores encounters between the "new" medium of photography and older textual and visual practices, but aims to go beyond  the diagnosis of a "winner-takes-all" competition that James offers. To this end, we are going to be considering theoretical approaches to photography and text-image interactions. Our focus, however, will on the intermedial genre of the "photobook": a text in which photography is not just an afterthought or illustration, but central to the work.

​​​​​​​Key examples will include Jacob Riis's pioneering work of investigative/muckraking journalism  How The Other Half Lives (1890), the documentary collaborations of Walker Evans and James in  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Teju Cole's recent Blind Spot (2017).