Morris, Wright - Alan Trachtenberg (essay date 1996)

Alan Trachtenberg (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “Wright Morris's ‘Photo-Texts’,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 109-20.

[In the following essay, Trachtenberg attempts to derive the significations of Morris's photo-texts through comparisons with photos by Walker Evans and a poem by Donald Justice.]

Wright Morris's inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several unique works of fiction, “photo-texts,” he called them, in which image and text stand to each other in quite unexpected ways.1 In The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God's Country and My People, (1968) picture and word cohabitate in a manner of mutual and complex exchange.2 At a casual glance these works might seem similar to the juxtapositions of word and image in documentary texts popular at the end of the 1930s, but a more careful look and reading...

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