DeLillo’s Photo Opportunity

Abstract

Examining the novels White Noise, Mao II , and Falling Man, this chapter studies DeLillo’s use of photography as a visual motif for dramatising how contemporary subjects understand the reality they participate in and construct. Via Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and others, it highlights DeLillo’s conception of the photograph as a nexus of intersubjective activity, incorporating those who are the subject of the photograph, the viewer of those pictures, the photographer herself, and the context for the photographic encounter in its production and reception. Dynamics of power arise out of what we consider a static image, explaining why, for DeLillo, the photograph is never merely indexical or ontological, but rather the site for the negotiation of cultural, symbolic, economic and political regimes. DeLillo shows that photography, precisely through its rampant availability and use, offers a kind of specular vision of contemporary America, at once reflecting conditions of crisis and, in re-presenting them, suggesting binding relational influences that can transform intersubjective experience. In what this chapter considers to be an ekphrastic gesture, DeLillo uses literature to dramatise the affect of photography, the lies it tells, and which by telling, he reveals.