Morris, Wright - Laura Barrett (essay date 1998)

Laura Barrett (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: “‘The True Witness of a False Event’: Photography and Wright Morris's Fiction of the 1950s,” in Western American Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 27-57.

[In the following essay, Barrett examines the vicissitudes of photographic reality according to Morris, and how Morris uses photography to influence our understanding of the actual world.]

The photographer's power lies in his ability to re-create his subject in terms of its basic reality, and present this re-creation in such a form that the spectator feels that he is seeing not just a symbol for the object, but the thing itself revealed for the first time. Guided by the photographer's selective understanding, the penetrating power of the camera-eye can be used to produce a heightened sense of reality—a kind of super realism that reveals the vital essences of things.

—Edward Weston,...

[The entire page is 11902 words long]

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