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graphs by Yasumasa Morimura. Millerton, New York:
Aperture, 2003.WRIGHT MORRIS
American
In 1933, Wright Morris left college for a year of
travel in Europe and bought his first camera, a Zeiss
Kolibri, in Vienna. Although he returned to Cali-
fornia in 1934 hoping to become a writer, Morris
remained intrigued by photography. In 1935, he
began with cloud studies captured on his Rolleifex;
he then turned to photographing alleys, structures,
and artifacts. By 1936, Morris began writing short
prose paragraphs that anticipate the style of his
1946 publicationThe Inhabitants.
Moving east to Middlebury, Connecticut, Wright
traveled to Cape Cod and other parts of New Eng-
land, where he worked with his first view camera, a
3¼4¼-inch Graphic. It was in 1938 that he first
encountered photographs by Walker Evans, who
became one of Morris’s most important photo-
graphic influences. By 1939, he had conceived of a
photo-text project; it was approved for publication
by James Laughlin at New Directions. Morris also
interviewed with Roy Stryker of the Farm Security
Administration photography project, although Stry-
ker was confused by and ultimately not impressed
with the lack of people in Morris’s photographs,
and thus he was not hired by this now-legendary
government make-work program.
The 1940s represent Morris’s most important per-
iod. He sold two photographs submitted in a photo-
graphy contest to the Museum of Modern Art in
1940 and published his first photo-text essay. His
photographic mission had crystallized: he sought to
capture icons of the American landscape in order to
preserve the past as well as to celebrate the beauty
conveyed by utilitarian structures that had often
fallen into disrepair. A large proportion of photo-
graphs from the 1940s depict barns, houses (interiors
and exteriors), barbershops, churches, and grain ele-
vators. Morris believed that the absence of people in
these photographs paradoxically ‘‘enhanced’’ their
presence: the structures and objects, he argued,
strongly suggested the ‘‘appropriate inhabitant.’’
Wright’s working method was the photographic
expedition, which culminated in his first and defining
experiments in photo-texts—The Inhabitants,pub-
lished in 1946, andTheHomePlace, published in- His first photographic tour lasted nine months:
in 1940 and 1941 he traveled through the south,
midwest, and southwest to California then back to
New York. His first Guggenheim Fellowship allowed
Morris to travel to the West Coast again in 1942,
returning to New York via Nebraska, his birth state.
In 1943, he undertook yet another photo-safari
that began in California and culminated with his re-
location in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, but included
travel through Colorado and Nebraska. His second
Guggenheim Fellowship permitted Morris to
embark on a photographic trip to Nebraska in
May and June of 1947, by which time he was using
a45-inch view camera.
InThe Inhabitants, Morris juxtaposes a photo-
graph on the right with text on the left in each
spread. Images of buildings predominate; not one
person appears. Instead of short, descriptive, or
factual captions that were by then traditional in
the photographic series, the text combines what
seems to be part of a running narrative by the
author with self-contained paragraphs that employ
varying personae. The former reads like an essay or
non-fiction; the latter like an excerpt from a short
story or novel. Conceptually, this was a daring
experiment on Morris’s part, for instead of record-
ing the inhabitants of these buildings and locales
through his camera, he provides for their existence
through his imagination in the form of words.
These texts, however, do not function as prose
poems that describe the photographic content or
offer a symbolic equivalent. Rather, they are echoes
MORIMURA, YASUMASA