Walker Evans: Carey Ross's Bedroom

Abstract

Focusing on photographic images in relation to literature and literary criticism, Richon guest edited, wrote the introduction and contributed an essay to a special issue of Photographies. The issue sought to widen the critical boundaries of the study of photography by a sustained reading, commentary and interpretation of specific photographic images. In the introduction, Richon proposed a re-evaluation of analogy and used the window as a framing device from the point of view of language and storytelling. Offering a close reading of visual signs, Richon’s editorial focus brought together texts by artists, philosophers and art historians including Michael Newman, Carol Mavor and Howard Caygill. In his essay, ‘Walker Evans: Carey Ross’s bedroom’ Richon performs a close study of one atypical image in a work by Walker Evans, who himself used references from 19th-century and early-20th-century French literature. Richon draws out the relation between depiction and description, the question of the copy and the visual notion of ‘mise en abime’ in literature and photography. ‘Walker Evans: Carey Ross’s bedroom’ was originally given as a paper at the ‘Literary Images’, Image and Language Research colloquium at the RCA (2009) and at the ‘Colloque International Fiction & Intermedialite’, Universite Paris 1-Pantheon-Sorbonne (2009). A French translation of this essay was published by the Sorbonne in 2013. Richon also presented his research into photography and literature in the paper ‘The demon of analogy: On literary images’, delivered at the Teaching Photography conference, Folkwang Museum, Essen (2010).