Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing; Autobiography and Photography

Timothy Dow Adams - Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing; Autobiography and Photography - Modern Fiction Studies 40:3 Modern Fiction Studies 40.3 (1994) 459-492. Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing; Autobiography and Photography Timothy Dow Adams Figures It may be averred that, of all the surfaces a few inches square the sun looks upon, none offers more difficulty, artistically speaking, to the photographer, than a smooth, blooming, clean washed, and carefully combed human head. --Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, 1857 Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story. --André Malraux, Lazarus For regular readers of Modern Fiction Studies wondering why a journal whose middle name is "fiction" would publish a special issue on autobiography, especially when coupled with photography, I begin with a brief rehearsal of the recent history of autobiography theory. Although autobiography was once thought of as nonfiction, a subgenre of biography -- and is still often classified under biography in libraries, book stores, and catalogues -- in recent years scholars working with the genre have almost universally come to the realization that whatever else it is, autobiography is not nonfiction. Beginning with Paul John Eakin's now standard Fictions in Autobiography, which argued that "the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive...