Michael Schueth
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Comprehensive
Portfolio II: Scholarly Paper
“The spectacle is not a collection of images;
rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
--Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle
“The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must
sit for her daguerreotype…”
--Walt Whitman, Song
of Myself (1855)
The twentieth-century
phenomenon of the “icon” celebrity (from Albert Einstein to Marilyn Monroe to
Madonna) has a fundamental relationship to the photographic image. As Catharine
R.
Stimpson contends in her foreword to Brenda Silver’s
recent Virginia Woolf Icon, the
twentieth-century icon “is unthinkable without the presence of the camera.”
Photography, Stimpson explains, “accelerates and reaffirms the process of
iconization and celebrity making” through modern modes of mass production
(xii). With icons such as Monroe and Madonna, we can easily imagine a
corresponding image of each, immortalized through the reproduction of those
images over and over again. Monroe
standing above the subway grate, for example, or Madonna in her cone-shaped
bustier in the early 1990s have become infamous portraits of these women,
standing as both a visual shorthand for their personality in particular and the
cultural era each represents. (Ever been
to a fake 1950s diner without seeing the Monroe photograph?)
Cather’s interest in her image is
documented by her legacy of portraits both in photographic form and through her
selection of artists Leon Bakst and Nikolai Fechin to paint her portraits.
While most of us encounter Cather’s image on literary postcards, on book
jackets, and as part of biographical and critical studies, these images are
necessarily pulled away from their original contexts. The need to build that original context back
into Cather’s visual legacy becomes critical as we investigate Cather’s
construction of her public personae, giving us insight into how she managed her
career and negotiated the ever-increasingly celebrity-driven literary
marketplace. In this paper I will explore the relationship between Cather and
her image by looking closely at selected photographs of Cather throughout her
life, culminating with Edward Steichen’s 1927 portrait of Cather in Vanity Fair. This essay will also argue that Cather’s
life-long interest in portrait and amateur photography provided her the tools
she needed to negotiate her image in the marketplace to build her literary
celebrity. Further, I will tie together the historical forces that brought
about celebrity culture and explore how Vanity
Fair and Edward Steichen’s involvement in her portrait positioned Cather as
a full-fledged celebrity of her time.
But first, I will discuss the critical role photography played in the
construction of the modern celebrity figure in nineteenth century American
culture.
Photography & the Invention of Modern Celebrity
Upon Cather’s birth in1873, her
parents took their baby daughter to Winchester, Virginia (confirm) to have her
photograph taken. Like most parents of
the time (as ours), it was an opportunity to capture a lasting image of a
fleeting age. This baby portrait marked
the first in what would be for Cather (and those in her generation) an entire
life documented in photographic images.
This, it is critical to remember, was a profoundly new possibility. While
Cather’s parents had their portraits taken as young adults, when photography
was an emerging novelty, Cather was born into a generation when photography was
now solidified into the culture, and her generation would face new and shifting
relationships to the cultural role image and personality played in private and
public life.
Photography rapidly absorbed
itself into American life after its invention in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé
Daguerre, and photographic portraits had taken a major place in the culture as
more and more lower and middle-class Americans could afford some type of
photographic portrait by the mid 1850s.
Family and friends collected portraits of loved ones, and documented
ceremonies such as the birth of a child, a marriage, or funeral.
Among many other early pioneers
who advanced the science of American photography, Matthew Brady brought the
emerging field into the realm of public spectacle. Brady’s high-profile
celebrity portrait studio capitalized on the public’s curiosity of photography
by exploiting the public’s even greater curiosity of, as Brady termed them,
“illustrious figures.” Brady
photographed such prominent men and women as Abraham Lincoln, General Robert E.
Lee, Jenny Lind, Thomas Cole, Clara Barton, Jefferson Davis, Walt Whitman and
P.T. Barnum (“Matthew Brady’s Portraits: Images as History, Photograph, and
Art”). The public flocked to Brady’s
galleries, paying admission to gaze at the images of public figures whose
life-like appearances were, aside from engraved portraits in books and
newspapers, wholly unknown to the mass public unless they were lucky enough to
see them on the street or stage. Brady’s
celebrity pictures had a larger effect than merely profiting from the public’s
desire to see famous faces, the power of the photograph and more specifically,
Brady’s artistic portrait style, brought about a shift in the “emotional
intimacy” between public figures and their audiences; that is, his photographs
were suggestive of the underlying humanity of his subjects, and his work helped
formulate our modern understanding of the celebrity as a “real” person, not
merely someone who existed in text or abstract lines of illustration. Importantly, he also had a penchant for
showmanship and created a public spectacle around his work, yet another
hallmark of modern celebrity making. Leo
Braudy, in his extensive study of fame, argues that Abraham Lincoln’s selection
of Mathew Brady as his photographer was based on Brady’s success as a celebrity
creator. Braudy says that Lincoln
“exploited” the new medium of photography to develop his “image of solemnity
and seriousness,” profoundly altering the image of the president into a picture
of “the ordinary man, the representative man, transformed into the
extraordinary by both his belief in principle and the demands of history”
(495-96).
In the early 1850s as Walt Whitman was transitioning from journalism
to the literary world, he brought with him the kinds of self-promotion and
advertising that he must have seen at work in the theatrical world. Much like Lincoln, Whitman used photographs
and illustrations of himself as a representation of the “the ordinary man” as
well as a mechanism to exploit his public personality. One of the most effective ways Whitman chose
to disseminate his public self was by publishing illustrations of himself in
his books. Since, as Whitman states in
his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves
of Grass, “the great poet is the equable man,” the visual illustration of himself as “one of the roughs” (50)
simultaneously served to illustrate his aesthetic principles and his public
recognitition. So the image of Whitman with an
open collar, posing casually with his hand on his hip was, according to Ed Folsom, “in sharp contrast to the expected
iconography of poets’ portraits, portraits that conventionally emphasized
formality and the face instead of this rough informality, where we see arms,
legs, and body” (140). Indeed, Whitman’s
image broke significantly with images of nineteenth-century poets who were
primarily illustrated in strictly formal settings. Personal appearance, too, reflects a class
difference between Whitman and the poets such as Longfellow, Lowell, and
Howells (check ot). While early Whitman
critic Emory Holloway felt that it was “a pity that he felt he had to advertise
himself or go under” by acting as “his own press-agent,” today critics
understand that Whitman was part of a much larger socio-economic cultural
shift, and that Whitman anticipated and even embraced that shift with a high
degree of skill and savvy. As Daniel
Boorstin notes, “Formerly, the public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the
public. Nowadays he has a press secretary to keep him properly in
the public eye” (61). Folsom agrees, arguing that Whitman’s use of his image in
Leaves of Grass had a “highly
influential” effect on “the way most American poets portrayed themselves on
their book jackets and frontispieces”(135).
While Whitman was not the only writer in the later half of the
nineteenth century to exploit his personality, his constant interest in
photography and image within his text created legacy that led to huge shifts in
the publishing industry. In an 1890
article published in The Author, a
trade journal for the growing occupation of professional writing, J.A. Bolles
notes that,
Articles by distinguished
individuals are splendid advertisements for the periodicals in which they appear;
articles by other contributors, unless they are very celebrated, are not
valuable as advertisements; and, as in all enterprises judicious advertising
has become an indispensable factor, publishers are simply following the modern
way of doing business by pursuing their present methods (144).
Bolles goes
on to note that “distinguished writers know that their success is not chiefly
due to their literary ability,” that now it takes “something besides
authorship” to attract public attention.
Whitman had a keen understanding of what that “something besides
authorship” meant to develop an audience. Whitman was aware of the power of
public personality held well before it became the reality of the American
marketplace. Grounded in his early
exposure to the daguerreotype in the early 1840s when he was still working as a
journalist, Whitman began meeting pioneering photographers such as Mathew
Brady, Gabriel Harrison, Jeremiah Gurney, and Thomas Eakins to list a few
(insert note here about Folsom’s research avail. on Whitman Archive). As David
Reynolds notes, Whitman’s fascination with photography had a major role in the
aesthetic development Leaves of Grass (281). Through the metaphor of photography, Reynolds
explains, Whitman had “a direct mimesis of reality, supporting Whitman’s
oft-repeated aim of establishing an honest, personal relationship with the
reader” (285). While Whitman certainly
wanted to create a personal relationship with his reader, the process of
illustrating himself into his printed volume demanded the creation of a
personae figure. The character Whitman
created, as Ed Folsom argues, “served as a kind of surrogate identification”
since Whitman excluded his written name from the title page of the 1855 edition,
and, even when Whitman added his name to future editions, his image worked as a
critical iconic frame of reference for Whitman’s readers (Folsom 135). Whitman
presented his image every chance he could get, whether as a visual image in Leaves of Grass, or through textual
description in various anonymous reviews and articles he penned about
himself. Note how closely this
description of himself written in the Washington Morning Chronicle in 1899 matches the 1855 pose in Leaves of Grass:
On Pennsylvania avenue or Seventh
street or Fourteenth street, or perhaps of a Sunday, along the suburban roads
toward Rock creek . . . you will meet moving along at a firm but moderate pace,
a robust figure, a robust figure, six feet high, costumed in blue or gray, with
drab hat, broad shirt-collar, gray-white beard, full and curly, face like a red
apple, blue eyes, and a look of animal health more indicative of hunting or
boating than the department office or author’s desk. (qtd. in Holloway 483).
Whitman’s use of
camera-like descriptions of himself throughout his review reveals how he built
his image in a variety of ways—either through the camera or through camera-like
description. What is vital here is not
that Whitman was merely interested in photography, but, moreover, that Whitman
fundamentally altered the relationship between the poet and the reader, so that
Whitman could be “frequently beloved at sight,” as he claimed (Holloway 485)[i].
As Whitman revolutionized the literary world with his image and
bravado, the larger entertainment world was following, using photography to
propel actors and actresses into new, unprecedented states of fame. When Jenny Lind, a relatively unknown singer
in the United States, toured American cities under the management of P.T.
Barnum, she had her photograph taken in virtually every city she stayed, and
quickly became one of the most well-known personalities in the country (Taft
81). Photography allowed for the dissemination of actors’ and actresses’ images
relatively inexpensively, especially through cartes de visite (small picture calling cards) as well as regular
picture postcards, which Cather bought as a child at The Red Cloud Opera House.
One of Cather’s favorite stars, Sarah Bernhardt, was largely responsible for
significantly changing the ways in which the public interacted with famous
theatrical actors. As Heather McPherson
argues in her look at actress Sarah Bernhardt’s photographic images, “Although
not the first to exploit the potential of new technologies and the emerging
mass media,” Bernhardt was “instrumental in creating a new paradigm…of the
modern mass-media star” (78). Bernhardt
used photography to “simulate and re-create the visual and emotional dynamics
of her performance,” and as a “genius” of publicity, she made sure newspapers
in Europe, England, and the US carried full-page picture stories related to her
every role.
Theodore Dreiser paints a vivid picture of theatrical celebrity in
his 1900 novel Sister Carrie. Dreiser’s novel focuses on the struggle of
his heroine from demeaning sweat-shop labor positions to the pinnacle of modern
day achievement: the limelight of the stage.
Carrie, we are told, “longed to
be renowned like others” in a “showy world” that “completely absorbed her”
(348). After being pulled from her
anonymous position in the chorus to a leading role, Carrie found a small notice
in the paper. As a small first step to building a larger fame, Carrie “hugged
herself with delight” (349). Later,
Carrie’s success grows, and she is renowned for her glamorous pictures which
appear frequently in the paper. Dreiser
details this celebrity world with characteristic social insight, as he tells us
that:
It was about this time that the newspapers and magazines were
beginning to pay that illustrative attention to the beauties of the stage which
has since become fervid. The newspapers, and particularly the Sunday
newspapers, indulged in large decorative theatrical pages, in which the faces
and forms of well-known theatrical celebrities appeared, enclosed with artistic
scrolls. (Sister Carrie 349)
As Dreiser notes,
the role of the actress in American culture during the 1890s and 1900s
exploded, and newspapers and magazines became a new venue for fame and a
barometer of success and cultural value.
According to an extraordinary 1903 Cosmopolitan article on photography
and image, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow notes that, “There is no class of women who are
so frequently photographed as actresses.” She goes on to explain that
photography “is a part of their professional life as much as learning their
parts or looking after their costumes.”
Woodrow argues that while actresses are certainly self-absorbed, it was
the photograph’s ability to advertise that was “very necessary to her success.”
Actresses, according to Woodrow, now needed a constant supply of new stylish
photographs ready for public consumption or else “she is subject to the
criticism that the public is tired of seeing her in one pose” since the
“personal attraction of an actress is one of her trump-cards which she hopes
will assist her in winning the game.” Fame, notoriety, and money are all
apparent signs of “winning the game,” as Woodrow puts it. “The dream of every
actress’ heart,” she tells her readers, “is that she may, with the
photographer’s aid, achieve a picture so unusual and so exquisitely delineating
her beauty that all the world shall wonder, admire, and hasten to see her in
the portrayal of her various roles” (680-81). Self image, then, had become
central to life in the public by the twentieth century, and it would demand a
stronger negotiation by those in the spotlight to discern between the public
and private. Leo Brady says that, “By
the later 19th century, all the inner Napoleons, neglected geniuses,
and spiritual adventurers—let alone the frankly ostentatious public man—had to
put on more of a show to catch the attention of both the audience to which they
played as well as the one they sought to reject” (491). It was impossible,
then, to be in the public spotlight and not be necessarily mixed up in the
forces that were driving actresses to replicate their image over and over in
the hopes of attaining some hope of fame.
Photography and the Cathers
While
Brady photographed the rich and famous, photography also began to cater to
lower and middle-class Americans. The
rapid innovation of photography combined with its inherent ability to produce
an image quickly and relatively inexpensively meant that “the camera
democratized the image” since “large numbers of people could afford pictures of
themselves” (Camera 22). Leo Braudy
agrees that photography shifted the ownership of one’s image from a high-brow
luxury to a middle-class indulgence. “One of photography’s most important
effects,” he writes, “was to take the art of imaging out of the hands of those
skilled enough to paint or engrave as well as those rich” (492). At the disposal of “virtually everyone,”
Braudy says that Americans found an “immense vogue for individual and group
portraits” after the Civil War. He
writes that the public’s
desire to be recorded on film, and
the desire of their friends, families, and admirers to retain those images was
more than just a personal quirk. It also seems part of an overwhelming cultural
need that photography half-discovered and half-simulated in order to furnish
memory with precise visual details of face, dress, posture, and in the ways one
appeared to others (493).
The ability to own
a life-like representation of a family member or loved one certainly played
into aspects of nineteenth-century sentimentality, in which photographs could
be kept as mementos of loved ones, children, and mark other life ceremonies
such as marriages and funerals. Gus
MacDonald believes that nineteenth century masses were attracted to photography
because it was “infused by the warmth of the past” and would “come eventually
to reinvest life with some reminders of its continuity and purpose” (59). In
the same 1903 Cosmopolitan
article discussed above, Mrs. Wilson
Woodrow writes that,
That the desire to be photographed
is almost universal is undeniable, else photography as a business would not be
a recognized feature of commerce, and photographers would not multiply in
numbers through the length and breadth of the land. Photographs! Photographs!
They are everywhere; they cover our tables, they lie about our rooms, thick as
the leaves of Vallombross (675).
In
attempting to understand why women are so attracted to having their portraits
taken, she suggests that besides serving women to “retain a record, at least,
of the beauty which is exclusively her own—to render lasting and changeless
that which in our nature is elusive and subject to imitation,” photographs also
serve as a “record” of those “we cannot see…in the flesh…some record of their
faces which shall assist our memories” (678;680).
After the Civil War photographic
studios became prominent throughout the United States—even remote pioneer towns
supported a full or part-time photographer.
As with most middle-class American families of the period, photography
was a meaningful part of Cather family life well before Willa’s birth. Photographs
in the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
suggest that Willa’s father, George P. Cather, was photographed as early as
1866 in Winchester, Virginia.
Studio portraits of the nineteenth century offered sitters the promise
of an exciting experience. Much like the
photographs of actors and actresses who posed in character with scenes and
props from their respective plays, the nineteenth-century portrait studio
offered everyone the opportunity to “perform.” Besides the theatre, studio
portraits took its inspiration from older forms of portraiture, in which
sitters were posed in various backgrounds or with various props to suggest
aspects of their personality, profession, or social standing. Portrait studios commonly featured such
amenities as “interchangeable backdrops, some on long rolls which could be
wound through parklands, seascapes, conservatories and palm houses, until one
was found to the sitter’s taste.” And
studios were equipped with “drapes and classical columns,” “rustic bridges,”
and even “swings and bicycles and motor cars” (Camera 30). Such theatrical settings can be seen in photographs
throughout Cather’s childhood and young adulthood.
As early as 1879, Red Cloud had its
first full-time photographer. According
to the Nebraska Gazetteer and Business
Directory, by the mid-1880s Red Cloud was supporting up to four
professional photographers: Earle Tennant, W. Dickinson, and J. Wegman, and C.
Owen. In 1888 the Bradbrook Studio
opened on the Moon Block, and for the next two decades it would be the most
stable and longest lasting portrait studio in town. Advertising in the Red Cloud Chief that when in town, visitors should “take the
trolley to Bradbrook Studio on the Moon Block” (Check Quote), since the novelty
of photography served not only Red Cloud residents, but also to rural visitors,
in town to buy necessities and spend extra money.
Bradbrook captured the first photographs in
which Cather as an adolencent took on a boyish appearance. As scholars have
repeatedly pointed out, these photographs serve to show her innate ability to
play with outward appearances. As Sharon O’Brien argues, Cather’s early
exposure to photography fostered a desire to “express the human possibilities”
(101). As Cather grew older, as Janis Stout reads it, she began “to realize
that such a [boyish] persona was not entirely necessary” (20). Instead, Cather,
seemingly without hesitation, began to dress professionally, adopting dresses,
cloaks, and fine hats, all the fashionable items required to take on her new
part-time job as drama critic for Lincoln’s newspapers. Cather, then, at an early age demonstrated a
keen knowledge and ability to transform her public identity through dress and
photography. Largely understood through
her knowledge and participation in the theatre, and through her reading and
knowledge of Whitman, who she wrote a critical review of in 1896. Whitman’s influence on Cather is most notable
in the title of her first major novel, O
Pioneers!, named after Whitman’s poem by the same title.
Cather and the Snapshot
While Cather’s portrait studio
photographs provide us with formal images of Cather, the growth of personal
amateur photography allowed for another side of Cather to emerge in private
photographs, meant for friends, family, and Cather herself. The large collection of known snapshot
pictures feature Cather relaxed settings, either on vacation site, or posed
with family and friends. Personal
picture taking by the mass public began with Kodak’s 1888 introduction of the
box camera. With a simple and effective
design, Kodak advertised it’s new camera with the slogan, “Anybody can use the
Kodak. Press the button—we do the rest” (Kodak
56). At twenty-five dollars, the camera included 100 pictures and developing,
and photography a playful amusement for the adventurous amateur. In his history
of Kodak, Douglas Collins says that “With its leather carrying case strung over
the shoulder, the Kodak camera was stylish, portable, and conveniently
available whenever the occasion called for a picture” (58). The new portable camera meant that people
could now integrate photography into their daily lives, taking photographs of
landscapes, family, friends and themselves in much more private, intimate
ways. Further, amateur photographers
were allowed total freedom in how to take pictures and how they wanted to
visually record their world. Such
possibility meant that amateurs could play with their own sense of style and
create a personal aesthetic style. For Cather, it seems that her personal
photography was a place to show a private side to her personality, but
nevertheless, it was also a place for Cather to experiment with poses,
clothing, and photographic techniques.
As photographs from the recently donated in the Philip L. and Helen
Cather Southwick Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln powerfully
suggest, snap shot pictures were a meaningful part of Cather’s life. As early
as her college years in Lincoln, Cather was posing for casual pictures. Perhaps the most well-known snapshot from
this period is a picture with Cather posed in front of a famous boulder on the
NU campus. Wearing a long dress and a
straw hat, she strikes a pose with her arms crossed before her. Importantly, it is the same pose that Cather
will strike for Steichen’s Vanity Fair shoot in 1927, and showcases
Cather’s early experimentation with a “look” that she would refine throughout
her life.
Snap shots effectively
document how much of Cather’s public image was a refection of her own private
taste, style, and everyday life. The sailor shirt and tie, a popular women’s
clothing item throughout the teens, twenties, and thirties, was a particular
favorite for Cather. Find photos to talk
about here…In tying her everyday style into her celebrity portrait for
Steichen, Cather was trying pull an authentic part of herself into her public
image. This suggests that Cather was very much aware of how her visual
celebrity culture worked, and how she tried to construct a more “real” sense of
herself in a media system that was, in many ways, dedicated to “a high-stakes
game of pursuit and seduction,” as Tyler Cowen puts it in his study of fame
(66).
The Graphic Revolution Fuels the Icon
In the 1910s and twenties, Cather was dealing with the after effects
of what cultural historian Neil Harris calls the “iconographical revolution,”
roughly covering the years1885-1910. The
increasing refinement of half-tone printing processes since the 1880s meant
that by the 1920s, magazines and newspapers could mass produce sharp
photographic-quality images cheaply. Cather knew first-hand of this emerging
technology as she worked at McClure’s Magazine.
In S.S. McClure’s My Autobiography ghost written by Cather,
McClure explains that “The
development of photo-engraving made such a publication than more possible[ii],” (207) and Cather’s
editorial position at the magazine positioned her at the center of this
emerging image culture.
The iconographical revolution was further advanced through the
growing motion picture industry. The
“movie star” became a new phenomenon that tied magazines, Hollywood, and
advertising together, giving rise to a much different public personality than
that of the nineteenth century; that is, these stars could generate significant
public interest and fascination not so much by what they did, but by the sheer
fact of who they were (Susman
223). In Richard Schickel’s His Picture in the Papers: A Speculation on
Celebrity in America based on the Life of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Schickel
argues that the movie celebrity forever altered the expectations the public had
toward all public persons. According to Schickel, politicians, writers,
artists, intellectuals, and even scientists became “performers so that they may
become celebrities so that in turn they may exert genuine influence on the
general public” (9). This transformation of the public figure into celebrity
figure resulted into two competing realities; on the one hand there was one’s
everyday common life and on the other, there was the life one lived through
newspapers and magazines, a reality in which celebrities could be “as familiar
to us, in some ways, as our friends and neighbors” dominating “enormous
amounts” of “psychic energy and attention” even though the closest the average
person would ever come to knowing these celebrities was in a half-tone
photographic image—literally, ink on paper (8).
This celebrity culture formulated itself most powerfully in the
pages of popular magazines, and no other magazine between the two world wars so
expressed that celebrity culture than Vanity
Fair, a gem in publisher’s Conde Nast’s crown that included best-selling Vogue and later, Home & Garden. Vanity Fair was founded in 1914 as a
competitor to H.L. Mencken’s The Smart
Set, and Vogue’s success allowed
Condé Nast to make Vanity Fair a
“slick” magazine that incorporated all the costly elements that the financially
rocky Smart Set was unable to give
its readers: high quality paper, graphic design, and a plethora of images.
Editor Frank Crowninshield bought a small New York “peekaboo” magazine by the
name of Vanity Fair in 1913, with a
short-lived intention to reincarnate it into a Vogue-like fashion magazine.
In 1914, however, Crowninshield decided that he wanted Vanity Fair to be a magazine “read by
people you meet at lunches and dinners” covering “the things people talk about
at parties—the arts, sports, theatre, humor, and so forth” (qtd. in Douglas
96). Crowninshield’s main interest was
making Vanity Fair something to talk about by publishing the first stories
on European and American avant garde literature and art. In
particular, Vanity Fair printed some
of the first images of Picasso and Matisse, ran poems by Dorothy Parker and
articles by Robert Benchley. As magazine historian George Douglas says of Vanity Fair, “it was as appealing to the
eye as it was to the tastes of its intended readers…it always had substance and
it always had guts” (94). With style and substance, Vanity Fair attracted the attention of New York’s educated and its
rich, and while it never attained mass market appeal (the circulation rate
hovered below 100,000), the expensive advertising rates Vanity Fair was able to charge its elite advertisers gave Conde
Nast a profitable income.
Although it began in 1914, the magazine didn’t hit its stride after
WWI, when, perhaps due to a mixture of toying with the magazine’s content
formula and the birth of the Jazz age, it became stylish to read. Readers of Vanity Fair are said to have conspiculously read the magazine in
public and placed copies of the magazine on coffee tables before parties. The popularity of the magazine suggests how
it so masterfully captured the spirit of the post-war era: witty, playful,
experimental, and rich. As John Russell
says in his introduction to Vanity Fair:
Photographs of an Age, “Vanity Fair was not in the business of
aesthetics. It was in the business of
getting people talked about” (xvii).
Those talked about included the obvious group of Hollywood and Broadway
celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, but also included a
surprisingly eclectic group of personalities including scientists, professional
tennis players, golfers, boxers, conductors, composers, writers, critics, and
even dog breeders. This construction of
celebrity within Vanity Fair intermixed full-page portraits of
well-known Hollywood and Broadway stars
with the less well-recognized, putting a glamorous face to writers,
intellectuals, and composers while at the same time giving an intellectual
flair to the Hollywood celebrity. Vanity
Fair, I suggest, defined celebrity in much more inclusive and even
intellectual terms than other popular magazines of its time. Within Vanity Fair one could be a celebrity
without the narrow definition of the “movie star.” Crowninshield assumed his readers were, as he
said, “people of discriminations, clever, and full of a wide and varied
culture,” and so he assumed that such readers would naturally be interested in
those he and his friends were interested in, from the stage actor to writer to
sportswoman (qtd. in Russel xii).
The Image Maker
Perhaps one of the most key aspects of the magazine’s popularity
stemmed from its use of photography within its pages. Crowninshield’s belief that fine fashion
photography could be elevated to an art form had helped Vogue become one of the most popular fashion magazines of the time,
and he had similar revolutionary plans for photography in Vanity Fair. Hiring
portrait artists who included Edward Steichen and Man Ray, relative unknowns in
the high art world since museums and collectors had no interest in buying
portrait photography, Crowninshield gave these photographers “privacy,
discretion, unstressed commitment” and paid Steichen (at least) a salary of
$35,000.
Edward Steichen had been in the art world for over twenty years by
the time he signed onto Vanity Fair.
Slightly younger than Cather, Steichen was born in 1879 in Luxembourg,
and came Michigan as a small boy. As a
young teenager he taught himself photography while apprenticing as a
lithographer. He moved to Paris to study
drawing and painting, but quickly became well known for his innovative
photography and for his photo portraits of famous artists. Moving back to New York in the early 1900s,
Steichen became involved with Alfred Stieglitz’s circle and he was a founding
member of “291” and Photo-Secession galleries.
During WWI, Steichen helped develop aerial photography and it was during
this period that he began a process of greatly re-evaluating his aesthetics. Moving from the early photographic style of
soft focus pictorialism, Steichen’s work with aerial photography began to peak
his interest in sharp lines and clean detail—the fundamental aesthetic
qualities that he used to transform portrait photography. By the early 1920s, Steichen attained fame
for avant garde work, yet, according
to Joanna Steichen, his “photography brought Steichen more fame than income”
(xx). That all changed in 1923, however, when Steichen accepted his potion with
Vanity Fair and Vogue. The
high salary commanded from Condé Nast raised eyebrows among Steiglitz’s crowd,
who saw Steichen’s venture into commercial photography as selling out on their
quest to improve the stature of photography in the art world. But, according to Joanna Steichen, he
believed in “the photograph’s potential as a medium for mass communication,”
viewing his work with magazines as an artistic and aesthetic challenge to raise
the everyday pedestrian magazine photo into an artistic object (xx). No doubt, Steichen’s knowledge of mass
communication directly led to his ability to produce what we now recognize as
iconic photographs of his subjects.
Cather first appeared in Vanity Fair in a 1922 article
titled, “American Novelists Who Have Set Art above Popularity: A group of
authors who have consistently stood out against Philistia,” Cather is featured
in group of authors including Theodore Dreiser (“among the most extraordinary
phenomena of American letters”), James Branch Cabell (“quite unlike anything
else in American fiction”), Edith Wharton (“The greatest living American
novelist”), and Sherwood Anderson (“Foremonst among those who are using the
novel as a means of criticizing American civilization”). For Cather, the magazine cite’s H.L. Mencken
belief that “My Antonia is the
best novel ever written by an American woman writer” (page reproduced in Amory,
Vanity Fair: Selections From America’s Most Memorable Magazine 58). The
magazine’s title for this page suggests some critical tensions with its own
view of celebrity culture as it highlights the fact that this group of authors
puts “Art Above Popularity” even though the magazine itself centers itself
around that celebrity culture. Perhaps
the key here is the magazine’s reference to the “Philistia,” or the low-brow
common reader who did not read Vanity
Fair and thereby defined the intellectual superiority of the Vanity Fair reader. Yet, no matter how Vanity Fair positioned these writers to its readers, the fact
remains that this first mention in Vanity
Fair marks her entrée into the developing celebrity culture of the
1920s.
Her inclusion into celebrity culture came to full fruition in 1927
when Cather’s Steichen portrait was featured in Vanity Fair. Cather and
Steichen had dinner plans in February 1927, most likely making plans for the
sitting. Certainly Steichen and Cather
shared common interests and his work (which included portraits of some of
Cather’s early heroes such as Duse and Bernhardt) must have fascinated
her. Furhter, Cather must have realized
that, as David Friend notes in his recent Vanity Fair article, Steichen was so
well known for his images that “fellow photographers snapped up issues of the
magazine each moth, hoping to detect new nuances in his lighting or backgrops
which they could then mimic” (370).
In the portrait published in Vanity Fair, Cather is featured
as Steichen captured most of his writers, sitting. She is looking slightly downward to the
camera with her arms on the chair, looking comfortable, relaxed and
self-assured. Titled “An American
Pioneer—Willa Cather,” with the sub-heading, “The Noted Novelist Has Just
Completed Her New Work ‘Death Comes for the Archbiship’,” the accompanying text
names Cather “the heir apparent to Edith Wharton’s lonely eminence among
America’s women novelists.” The text
further notes that
She writes in a way that seems
utterly transparent and forthright but that conceals in its overtones a vast
and subtle interplay of ironical intelligence. The depth and variety of her
understanding is implicit in a swift, muscular style, wrought with an economy
that discovers the inevitable word and the inevitable idea.
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Joanna Steichen notes that in many of Steichen’s photographs of
women subjects that “no matter what the pose, the era, the woman’s age or
position in the world, her eyes confront the camera directly, holding their
own, challenging the observer” (89).
Certainly this estimation fits aspects Cather’s portrait, especially in
terms of her body language in which crossed arms signify confrontation. But perhaps Cather’s gaze here is more
complex than a simple challenge to her viewer: there is a warmness in her eyes
that gives the portrait a rich sense of Cather’s sympathy and at the same time,
there is a sense of self-assuredness, as though she is telling her audience
that she has proven herself in the world, and she has done it on her own terms.
Further, the softness of her linen shirt and the loose tie around her neck,
rather than giving an effect of a stuffy masculinity, give the viewer the sense
that we have found the writer at work.
How pre-determined this pose was set up is perhaps difficult to
speculate. According to one biographer,
Steichen liked to improvise on his Vanity
Fair portraits—since these last-minute improvisations usually led to his
best work. Joanna Steichen says that her husband often “set up” last minute changes “to transmit the
essence of a play or a personality in a single image,” and that he was
interested in capturing “private character
in the public fasces he photographed” (89-90). This famous picture of Greta
Garbo, for example, was taken after Steichen complained about her “fluffy”
hair, and in frustration she pulled it back (515). Steichen is known to have worked closely with
his famous models, putting them at ease and drawing out of each the real person
behind the public face (514).
While there is little evidence of Cather’s participation and
reaction to the Vanity Fair issue, what we have suggests she was proud
of the picture. Blanche Knopf was so
impressed with the Vanity Fair issue she sent a telegram to Cather in
Wyoming writing, “have just seen steichen
photograph in vanity fair simply superb don’t you think would like to use it
too if they permit and you approve with my love”(17 June 1927,
HRC). Cather quickly replied that by
contract the photo belonged to Conde Nast (WC to BK 19 June 1927, HRC). Later
in the late ’30s, Cather approved the Steichen photo for her Autograph edition
with Knopf.
The Iconic Cather
Much like Whitman, Twain, and
Charlie Chaplin, the building blocks of the American iconic figure seem steeped
in a tradition of visual repetition through dress, what Sarah Burns calls “key
markers of the public self” (223). While Cather never developed a strict
costume as Twain’s post 1906 white suit ensemble, Cather developed and maintained
a visual look that the public could easily recognize after her break with McClure’s. In doing so, Cather built her iconic image in
a subtle, but nevertheless effective, visual manner through her white middy
blouse with loose-fitting tie. The look,
much in the tradition of Whitman, ties Cather to her middle and working class
readers since the look was popular, comfortable, and relaxed. Snap shot pictures reveal that this look was
not a staged fiction, but rather an expression of her everyday daily style. The “Cather” constructed in the glamorous
Steichen photo is the same Cather captured in private snap shot photographs at
Grand Manan.
That Cather continued to wear the middy blouse and tie after 1927
reflects her interest in this look. In 1933 and 1940 newspaper features on
Cather, for example, she reappears in her middy blouse and tie, and affirms the
former iconic image she created years before. While the Steichen photograph
highlights the celebrity culture and image of the 1920s, the outdoorsy, snap-shot
style of these photographs presents the same Cather in nature. Authors of both
features pick up on Cather’s image as a writer of the prairie, and ties her
physical appearance into her literary style. For example, in Dorothy Canfield
Fisher’s 1933 essay on Cather, the sub-head
reads, “Willa Cather Lived Her Books Before She Wrote Them. Her Girlhood
Was Spent on the Unfenced Prairie; She Knew the Trials and Triumphs of the
Pioneer.” In the New York Herald Tribune article,
authors Stephen Vincent and Rosemary Benet similarly describe Cather as a real,
unaffected person, having “no ivory tower about” her, as the say, since “she is
too hearty for that.” Of her appearance
they wite, “Of medium height, with clear blue eyes, she gives an impression of
great intellectual vitality and serenity combined, calm strength and lively
independence” (6).
Works
Cited
Cather, Willa.
Telegram to Blanche Knopf. 19 June 1927. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Collection.
Harry Ransom Research Center,
University of Texas-Austin.
Douglas, George H.
The Smart Magazines. Hamden, CT: Archon P, 1991.
Edkins, Diana, ed.Vanity Fair: Photographs of an Age. NY:
Random House, 1985.
Knoph, Blanche.
Telegram to Willa Cather. 17 June 1927.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Collection. Harry Ransom Research
Center, University of Texas-Austin.
Schickel, Richard.
His Picture in the Papers. NY:
Charterhouse, 1973.
Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: U Chicago
P, 2000.
Steichen, Joanna. Steichen’s Legacy. NY: Knopf, 2000.
[i]
Unlike many other 19th century writers who created non-de plums to invent a literary
character to help separate the private writer from the public eye, such as
Fanny Fern and E.D.E.N. Southworth, Whitman creation of “Walt Whitman” was a
more authentic public personae, and that personae complicated the line between
public and private life, fact and fiction.
While the images he published of himself were largely life-like
representations, they were nevertheless staged creations--staged as any studio
portrait is an artificial pose created by the photographer’s expertise and the
sitter’s imagination. Perhaps the most famous Whitman photograph that documents
the “unreality” of his personae is his early 1880s portrait in which Whitman
sits in profile with arm resting on his chair, gazing at a butterfly on his
finger. Although Whitman is quoted as
defending that it “was an actual moth,” the butterfly was actually a cardboard
cutout, found after Whitman’s death. The
butterfly, then, becomes an interesting metaphor in discussing Whitman’s image
and the layers of possible fictions that lie between Whitman and his
viewer. While photographs provided
Americans with a new realistic look at life, it was not without its visual tricks. As Folsom notes, the butterfly acts as an
important metaphor throughout Leaves of
Grass, and so in looking at images of Whitman or any other writer for that
matter, the viewer must read under the various layers of visual meaning that
may be at work (“Notes on Whitman Photographs” n. 18).
[ii]
). Indeed, as magazine historian David Reed notes of McClure’s, “photographs had come to play a … prominent role on the
magazine’s pages at 49% of all reproductions used”
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