>Louise Hornby, Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film

Abstract

‘We are told [modernism] strives exclusively, excessively, toward motion’, Louise Hornby writes in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film – ‘we see motion by not seeing clearly’ (pp. 190, 21). Hornby’s study into the very antitheses of modernism, principally the ideas of stillness, stagnancy and the fixed image, is predicated on this notion of flawed perception. Modernism, we are constantly reminded, is an aesthetic cultural mode in which motion, motility and speed inhere. Hornby’s refreshing study pulls the airbrakes on such preconceptions and, through attentive consideration of early photographic luminaries such as Anna Atkins and Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as a focused collection of literary sources from Marcel Proust to Virginia Woolf, argues that modernism is only ever as swift-moving as we allow it to be. It can be held fast, she suggests; it can be paused, rewound and scrutinized frame-by-frame. From the macro, fascistic ideals put forward in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) to the nuanced narrative innovations of stream of consciousness, motion has defined how we read, write and think about modernism as a genre. The quick-fire relation of psychologies in Woolf’s prose, the frenetic polygons of the Cubists, the poster-ready platitude of ‘Make it New’, all point towards modernism’s ‘kinetic drive’, a truism across modernist texts both literary and visual that Hornby takes to task in this new publication (p. 1). She is interested in seeing stillness as a ‘formal polemic’, in probing further the immanent potentiality of photography to disrupt ideas of ‘technological determinism’ (pp. 3, 9). Whilst the rest of modernity appeared to rally against literary realism, their throttling towards progress buffeted by two world wars, Hornby privileges the figures and their mediums who brought such momentum to a halt, if but for a second, and let the light in.