Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. By Timothy Dow Adams. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. xxi, 298pp.

Reviewed by Roger J. Porter

Many years ago at the Portland Art Museum I taught a course en-
titled "The Autobiography of the Artist" in which I hoped to break down the barriers studio art students insisted on erecting between the verbal and the visual. If I had had Tim Adams's new study, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, before me at the time, my task would have been easier, and the students would have learned more than they did. Adams, whose previous criticism dealt with lies in autobiography, has found exciting new ground on which to play out the eternally-vexing question of truth and construction in autobiography: in his current work the battleground is complicated by the presence of visual imagery--mostly photography--that has been incorporated into autobiographical texts, as well as by the intrusion of autobiography into works of photography. The relation between referentiality and form and between text and image are complex and fascinating, and Adams handles both issues with his characteristic deftness and imagination.

Adams is well-grounded in contemporary theories of photography and photographic aesthetics, and he employs his knowledge to illuminate the teasing question of how to read photographs--no simple matter if one is confronting isolated pictorial images but far more difficult when the photos are embedded in autobiographical texts. Are we to take such photos as documentary evidence, verifying or corroborating assertions made in the text, or rather as images ironically confounding the narrative? And how can we know? Adams invokes such critics as Stanley Cavell (who claims that "the image is not a likeness; it is not exactly a replica, or a relic, or a shadow . . .") to bolster his position that the incorporated images as well as the autobiographical language are located on the border between fact and fiction and that photographs conceal as much as they reveal. Both autobiography and photography have problematic relations to the world they purport to represent. Adams argues that because in this way photographs function much like the text that surrounds them, their presence in life writing is always and appropriately paradoxical, leaving much to the discerning, investigating reader to figure out. This is a sensible position, and one that obviously comports with both autobiographical and photographic theory. The pleasure in reading Adams' skillful analyses is twofold: first, in

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

his discussion of each autobiographical work he elaborately and carefully traces the relationship of the two forms of expression, and second, he examines the reason(s) a particular autobiographer deploys photographs or, in the several cases where there are no actual photos in the work, how and why the autobiographer describes thematically significant photographs even though they never appear in the text. Adams is sensitive to both the intentions and the results of these writers' autobiographical impulses.

Adams is interested in the way photographs enrich autobiographical texts by appearing in many different guises: as documents, as family album photos, as trick photos, as copies of other photos, or as metaphors for the acquiring of an identity. Just as biography can find a place inside autobiography, so portraiture can become a form of self-portraiture. Above all, he is concerned with the self-conscious manner with which autobiographers incorporate these images, seldom limiting their use to mere illustration. Rather, the very problematic referentiality of the photographs raises more questions than they easily answer. Adams suggests that photography "may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography," and that "seem" is crucial.

Light Writing and Life Writing comprises three main sections. The first focuses on autobiographies where photographs are subordinate to the literary text, the second on autobiographies where image and text "work together," and the third on autobiographers who are also photographers. Many of his texts are hybrids, not just in their use of non-verbal media but in their incorporation of multiple autobiographical forms and genres, such as poetry, autobiographical fiction, mini-biography, and memoir. In most cases, Adams has chosen texts that deal with family matters, largely to delineate relationships between the autobiographer and important other figures in his or her life, especially relations between children and their parents.

The first section contains chapters on Paul Auster (his search for an absent father and the examination of his own problematic identity are conducted through a trick multiple photograph of his father and a trick photo excising his grandfather); on Maxine Hong Kingston (her work contains no photographs because she considers them too unreliable, though she does include verbal descriptions of photos and their ghostly tracings of history); and on Sheila and Sandra Oritz Taylor (the two sisters include numerous family photos, many of whose complexity mirrors the two women's multiple identities as they attempt to overcome fixity just as the photos violate a fixed camera viewpoint).

The second section treats Scott Momaday (his photos stress his identity as both Anglo and Native-American, as the photos represent composite blends of different cultures); Michael and Christopher Ondaatje (they represent another set of siblings writing about their family and

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employing archival photographs that deliberately and enigmatically resist documentary interpretation); and Reynolds Price (a frequent writer on photography, he is skeptical that the surface of photos can tell us much about their subjects).

The third section deals with Eudora Welty (a noted photographer in her own right, her interest in the relation between the observed and the observer in the photo parallels her fictional narrative procedures); Wright Morris (a celebrated photographer and photography critic, his photographs and novels play with time and history, and his story-telling, whether in language or visual image, interweaves life and art, evasion and exposure, resemblance and difference); and Edward Weston (the photographer, who has recorded his creative vision in his Daybooks, composes in a diary form, which resembles the composition and perspective of his photographic work).

As I've suggested, Adams is particularly insightful in establishing motives for writing and for a writer's photographing or assembling pictures in the text. In one of the best chapters he shows how, when Eudora Welty takes a photograph, she sees in it the very form that one of her stories might take. In her photos, she is concerned with the interplay between the photographer and her subject; she seeks to be "invisible but not effaced." Adams delineates how this way of photographing gets into Welty's fiction, and though he doesn't say so explicitly, he implies that her autobiographical text, One Writer's Beginnings, works in a similar way by making problematic the relation between the writing "I" and the "I" written about. Deciding just how to frame a subject is Welty's principal concern, and her autobiography creates a space where she can merge her photographic and writerly lives.

One of the many virtues of Adams's work is that even though it deals with one specific visual medium, it makes us ponder why visual artists working in a range of formssculptors, architects, paintershave felt a need to write about their lives, and it makes us ask how they have conceived the relation between their art and the kind of writing they have chosen to do. These are the questions I tried to ask in my Museum Art School course, and to which Tim Adams gives responses that are models of judgment and elegance.

Reed College