Narrating Photography in The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Abstract

Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is result of a collaborative effort between photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Their unique fusion of and images provides an opportunity to examine how two media can be brought together to form composite modes of expression. DeCarava and Hughes's reveals their deft command of both African American and Western cultural practices, which they employ to forward their vision of black Americans as full participants in American life and culture. My analysis of Sweet Flypaper of Life explores intersection of visual and verbal in work. two media are most fully appreciated through their relation to one another, as they are shown to interact in a constant flux of boundary crossings, resulting in a dynamic interconnectivity. In addition, two media are linked and interrelated by a passion for subversion: images created by DeCarava deviate from and subvert standard portrayals of black Americans in mainstream media, while text created by Hughes resorts to trickster tactics, articulating a double-edged message of compliance and subversion. Sweet Flypaper of Life has received little critical attention to date. None of approaches put forth has sought to read text comprehensively as an instance of boundary crossings between two media, yet they touch on complexity of image-text and provide a springboard for my investigations. Thadious M. Davis suggests, The dual communicative nature of enterprise aims at both a verbally oriented access and a visually oriented one. Yet, she keeps verbal and visual separate, positing that collaborative effort gives two contextual realities: that of the individual behind camera and individual behind word (152). Maren Stange emphasizes innovative photographic approach of DeCarava, delineating his struggle for artistic autonomy. She generally regards Hughes's verbal intervention with DeCarava's photos as reductive, an injustice to fullness of work (77). Yet in her closing argument, Stange examines a few one-word titles provided by DeCarava to his photographs, juxtaposing them with Hughes's verbal references, which leads her to suggest that issue of words can be reframed ... to enable a wider range of possibility: rather than only marking weakness and inadequacy, intertextual language may act as well to legitimate, empower, and liberate (85). Sara Blair's discussion of book situates it within shifting traditions of documentary reportage in Harlem. She underscores both Hughes's belief in power of image ... to render visible and to dignify its subjects (53) and DeCarava's desire to transform expressive capacities of medium (55). Blair implies that their attempts to forge new modes of expression were successfully explored in their unique collaborative effort, yet she does not fully explore how this occurs. My approach goes further, reading image and text as instances of cross-fertilization. My discussion originates in unconventional tale of production and publication of this book. DeCarava's photographs were rejected by publishing houses until Hughes created a verbal text to go along with them. This paper examines reasons behind rejection of DeCarava's photographs and considers function of text and how it mediated images to enable their publication. First, I discuss how DeCarava's photographs differ from other photographs of black Americans. In order to understand uniqueness of his and unwillingness to publish it, I survey standard representations of African Americans in media, underscoring DeCarava's distinct point of view. text written by Hughes pitches to two disparate audiences and lends itself to different readings. Unlike Arnold Rampersad, who feels text match[es] images almost perfectly (244), I suggest that it adopts a trickster strategy, which not only appealed to white publishers and their readership, but also spoke to African American readers through a complex network of signifying, conveying meanings that might have escaped many non-African American readers. …