Chapter 3 Photography, Revision, and the City in Henry James’s New York Edition and Alvin Langdon Coburn’s London
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Abstract
Though he dismissed the idea of “artistic” photography, Henry James chose a photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, to illustrate his collected works. Coburn’s twenty-four frontispieces for the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907–09) depict scenes from James’s personal history and the worlds of his fiction. Their production required a complicated form of authorship shared between the photographer and the novelist, both artists and their urban subjects, and James’s past and present artistic visions. In his Preface to The Golden Bowl, James drew on his experience with Coburn to theorize fiction’s relation to place and to depict textual revision, too, in spatial and photographic terms, as a process that unites active seeking and passive registration. This literary vision resonates with Coburn’s pictorialist accounts of photographing the modern city. It also extends James’s enduring interests in the interchange between fiction and the visible, photographable world, especially the city and especially London, and between the accidents and masteries involved in any work or life.