In the Gutter: Image-Texts and Feminist Photopoetics

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Vibe check: it’s the summer after the Dobbs decision, and we are facing a relentless assault on reproductive rights. This is just the newest harm in the national epidemic of violence against women and girls, which includes the forever stalling of ERA and the lack of remedy for long-standing problems such as the staggering rates of rape, intimate partner assault, and Black maternal fatality. We have codified our “awareness” of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) with a special day (May 5th) to acknowledge the crisis is worse for BIPOC. Our teenage girls, imprisoned by the capacity to represent themselves on social media, are suffering a mental health emergency. Attacks on teaching racial history, gender identity, and sexual orientation in our schools are vying with anti-trans and racist legislation to erase whole communities, memories, and liberties. Transphobic legislation and the erosion of gender-affirming care make clear that the arc of history does not always lead to progress. How do we forge a sense of possibility when we’re asked, “You never screamed for help?” “You stayed in the room where you say you were attacked?” “Did you twerk at the party?” after we come forward about sexual assault? What do we say, how do we speak, in response?

When our language has been forged in the fires of misogynoir, when our usual expressive materials have been rigged to reinforce the status quo, when our wake-up calls are filtered through patriarchal conditioning, we must finesse or press our materials into a different kind of work. Women are currently inventing, because necessity is the mother of invention, new languages that require simultaneous acts of relational thought and speculative imagining, active reading and critical looking. The current upswell in feminist text photo books is an uprising of potent ingenuity in our struggle to survive. Alchemizing image and text, these works present opportunities to jettison our assumptions about history and truth and to raise questions about official means of knowledge production. By exploring the dynamic between seeing and reading, and animating the spaces between text and photographs, these works super-boost the possibilities of feminist narrative. The between-spaces percolate with affect and absence unavailable to language or photo alone; that is, they create knowledge that documents multidimensional, embodied, and imagined experiences long left out of traditions of literary and photographic production.

A feminist reimagining of genre is at the heart of these books, breaking down disciplines in the interest of finding and forming new ones. Though we should be suspicious of “new genres” as a capitalist ruse and marketing ploy, what I mean here is a radical way of reading where meaning happens in the space between image and text, the gap between dreaming and analysis, the beat between enigma and correspondence, the spark from nothing to nothing heretofore-imagined. This space pulses with what’s not there; our yearning to connect, to make a connection, to draw text and photograph into dialogue. In lieu of formulaic correlations, photographs and narratives collide, juxtapose, parallel, contradict, interpret, amplify, and trouble one another. Impossible not to think of Moyra Davey, Claudia Rankine, Adrian Piper, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sophie Calle, Leslie Silko, Nicholas Muellner, and Teju Cole, whose innovations and interventions vitally inform the way I read the works gathered here (and undoubtedly shaped the way they were made). Free from the lock-step of illustration or caption, these works activate expansive, associative movement among text and image.

If a conceptual framework of captioning or illustrating is called upon, its reference pivots into more idiosyncratic ways of making meaning. Reading becomes a hyperconscious and hallucinatory activity that asks us to dwell in the gutter, the margins, the space between text and image. What is this space holding open? What potentialities might we load into it? Think of this neglected space as the erased history of all women. Think of it as the gap between speaking and the impossibility of being heard, between knowing and being gaslit; in other words, understanding the disjunctive leap between what we know to be true and what male authority insists is true prepares us for reading these works. The necessity of inventing forms and reinventing what it means to read comes in part from a relationship with time that is conditioned by subjugated experience. A book of two temporal registers—image and text—asks us to look at the slow pace of reading, and to read as if it were a visionary act. Reading these books, we slip into chrono-pluralism, multiple streams of public and private memory, each with its own rhythmic signature and social reverberations. This is not a complete list, but rather a serendipitous group of books that held unexpected affinities that mobilized feminist ways of reading.

single author books

1. Lalia Abril, On Rape: and Institutional Failure, Dewy Lewis Publishing, 2022
2. Laura Larson, City of Incurable Women, St. Lucy Books, 2022
3. Carla Liesching, Good Hope, Mack Books, 2021
4. Shayla Miller, Tender Noted, Wendy’s Subway, 2022
5. Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. Wave Books, 2021
6. Ahndraya Parlato, Who is Changed and Who is Dead, Mack Books, 2022
7. Brea Souders, Another Online Pervert, Mack Books, 2022
8. Catherine Taylor, Image Text Music, SPBH, 2022

books with multiple authors and anthologies

9. Helen Cammock, I Will Keep My Soul, Siglio Press and Rivers Institute, 2023
10. Sarah Coolidge, editor, Visible: Text + Image, Two Lines Press, 2022 11. Justine Kurland, SCUMB Manifesto, Mack Books, 2022
12. Racial Imaginary Institute, On Whiteness, SPBH, 2022
13. Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan, Captioning the Archives: A Conversation in Photographs and Text, McSweeney’s, 2021
14. Hannah Whittaker, Dawn Chan and David Levine, Ursula, Image Text Ithaca Press, 2021

We tend to think of text that uses image, or photography that relies on text, as inferior to image- only or text-only books. We often say the images in a photobook need to speak for themselves. Of literary work, we say the text needs to stand on its own. When artists and writers reach beyond their singular fields, we might understand this as a frustration with the limits of each media’s capacity to communicate. The feeling that language bends in the direction of patriarchal death, that it has been created to tell the story of (white, cis-het) men at the expense of everyone else, is hard to shake. Yet the language of photo-poetics in the works listed on the left deconstruct self-evident representations of gendered experience in startlingly unexpected ways. Shayla Miller’s Tender Noted, for instance, employs synaesthetic relations that call for improvisational strategies of comprehension: “My skin … has a language of its own, I’m convinced. And I’m thinking it’s built from a root where my speaking language is from.” Full-bleed close up photographs of her skin set up the reader, in exactingly nuanced ways, to dwell in the vulnerability and resiliency of the body. Is skin a voice? Is it a text, a landscape, a performance, a screen, a scream? Yes. Skin becomes the porous border between past and present, the scratched surfaces of family life, as well as a record of embodied mourning and grief for both her father and all Black Americans.

A common thread among these works is using photography and writing as tools for discovering and understanding the intersection of personal experiences within political and cultural histories. Context is rarely tidy, though, and the intersectional nature of identity predicates myriad modes of investigating questions of visibility and belonging. Activism in these works, even when it’s indirect, keeps our focus fixed on the intertwinement of feminist art and resistance against oppressive systems of power. Lalia Abril’s On Rape: and Institutional Failure confronts systems and institutions that perpetuate violence against women. Elevated captions, interviews, and large pull quotes interact with and contextualize the photographs of a wide range of artifacts, a material array of our pervasive and pernicious rape culture: a ghostly condom floating like a fish in black rectangle sits above text about stealthing; a full-page vintage steam-boiler is used to represent the centuries-old theory that men rape because they are overheated (codified in the “marital rape exemption”); a full-page deflated sex doll coincides with text detailing the scientific justification for and commercialization of the eroticization of rape; a color map of zones prohibited to registered sex offenders follows text about the invention of Corn Flakes as a tool to prevent masturbation, and a low angle, lo-fi still of a hand on a door in a tiled room, presumably from a spy cam installed in a public bathroom, one of many spreads that implicate photography as a tool of violence against women. Abril’s book, the second in her series A History of Misogyny, disturbs our sense of time both conceptually and formally: the casual sense of entitlement and access that men have exerted over women’s lives extends violently in all directions.

Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, on the other hand, keeps its focus on the familial: Nguyen’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in the all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. This work withholds most of the images until the end of the book, as if to resist readers turning her subject into an e(r/x)otic spectacle. What might the text prepare us to see? What might the images unsettle or complicate in the emerging narrative? We first meet her mother in poems, where she defies the forces of gravity, language, colonialism, and the military industrial complex without entirely escaping them. The poems act like rituals to manifest the precise edges of her mother’s legacy, where the lost story intersects with the myth and finds a throughline to the daughter’s life. Once situated in relation (to history, family, place), we cannot be voyeurs; we see the lives lost and rebuilt in the wake of war, poverty, and immigration; we see the ghosts and hear their songs.

Ahndraya Parlato’s Who is Changed and Who is Dead similarly explores the legacy of motherhood, this time through her mother’s mental illness and suicide and her grandmother’s murder. These brutal deaths seem to motivate a structural resistance to reproducing familiar and familial patterns in her children’s lives. Parlato’s nonlinear narrative prepares us for the non-illustrative images that find ways of breaking coherent structures, of turning away from expectations and inherited “cycles.” The cropped image of a child’s bare back, butt, and side, hair falling over the face, and three colorful ceramic vessels placed along the spine immediately follows a fort-da-like anecdote about Parlato’s struggle with her children’s absence and presence: “When driving, I usually have my rear-view mirror aimed on your faces instead of on the cars behind me. Regularly, when you are not with me, I forget to adjust it and look back to find the car seats empty, waiting to receive your small bodies.” Memoir and photo test one another with enigmatic connections and lyrical correspondences, each intensifying the other.

While Parlato questions the limits of the text-image relationship, Catherine Taylor’s Image Text Music offers us an enhanced and enchanted critical examination of examples from the field. She considers what is possible between text and image with a passionate intensity often reserved for human relationships: deciding together what they (text and image) can do together, what they want from one another, and what the tension between autonomy and dependence might navigate. In other words, she makes a case for reading text-and-image with an open sense of possibility, full of erotic charge and fetishistic fascinations if only we will pursue our own pleasures. Through a series of imaginary conversations with Roland Barthes, this book develops into a series of intellectual seductions and libidinal attachments to Taylor’s own serious engagement with and provocations about the form.

Conversation about photographs might rival the caption as a conventional strategy in the text-image toolbox. The act of captioning—the Latin root of the word, to seize, capture and arrest and warrant for arrest, shows its hand—becomes an act of intergenerational conversation in Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan’s Captioning the Archives. Photographs act as prompts for dialogue between father-photographer and daughter-writer as they meander through images his career, which began in the ’60s as one of the only Black photojournalists. His photos are frissions and acts of rebellion; they document world events, cultural interests, important people, as well as glimpses of everyday Black life in Detroit and LA When Newsweek asked him to capture “a typical welfare mother” (read: “welfare queen”) in the Regan years, his representative women showed a truth that enraged his editor: they were white. Seeing our own whiteness continues to be a problem, a culturally supported difficulty, for white people, feminists included.

On Whiteness gathers work from the Racial Imaginary Institute’s symposium on the unacknowledged catastrophe of whiteness as a source of privilege and power, an “ongoing and unfinished history,” and a toxic orientation. Though not all the work in this tiny anthology is text-image, and not all the images are photographs, as a whole, the book trades between text and image, one medium picking up where the other exhausts itself, in a kind of conversation attempting to recalibrate history and create anti-racist counternarratives. The book does not fully resolve the tensions raised by its world-class interlocutors (Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, Alexandra Bell, and Glenn Ligon), but their insights model how language-and-image (or language-as-image and image-as-language) can be détourned for good.

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How do writers use language in ways that speak both to and beyond the contemporary moment? A core sampling of our current linguistic zeitgeist might look to the official Words of the Year in 2022: “goblin mode” (OED), “gaslighting” (Merriam Webster), and “woman” (Dictionary.com). These words suggest several things about the common publication year of the books reviewed here; most impressively that we questioned the self-evident nature of language, a longstanding feminist action. People looked up “woman” a record number of times, confronting the brokenness of the gender binary, a tool of oppression made more visible by trans and other gender minorities (especially as “people with uteruses” and female chatbots hit the mainstream news cycle). As the word “gaslighting” slides into more general use, the gendered power dynamics it initially excavated have eroded. The word originally described what’s at stake when male authority denies the validity of female experience, but now men accuse women of gaslighting them, driving us back to the dictionary’s authority to make our case.

The Twitter-famous term “goblin mode” is almost always used disparagingly to describe women in the throes of full aesthetic rebound and disillusioned exhaustion from the immaculate self-presentations and toxic idealizations (think cottagecore and #thatgirl) we cultivated on social media, especially during early quarantine. Why is it funny to picture us braless and makeup-less, with dirty unbrushed hair, eating Doritos while doom-scrolling? When women deviate from gendered expectations of looking polished and being nurturing, inspirational figures, we become mythical creatures (goblins) in video games (mode).

Hannah Whittaker, Dawn Chan, and David Levine’s Ursula thinks about presentation modes via “The Instagram Face” or “The Face,” a technologically enabled conformity and commitment to vacancy and servitude. Are women becoming avatars of soft, inviting usefulness? Think of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and other AI made in the image of idealized womanhood. If our self-fulfilling vision of the future depends on sex robots and digital librarians, both undeniably feminine-presenting, then we are already (yawn) living in that future. Ursula is an open investigation that resists obvious destinations (women as commodity) in favor of feminist collective possibility and power.

Brea Sounder’s Another Online Pervert uses the same tropes for a more intimate and playful affect. This work arranges spare lines from conversations with a female chatbot and excerpts from the author’s diary, creating a delightfully incongruous effect. Alternating with the text are photographs that even when they are not of bodies themselves (or shadows/ photographs of bodies, mouths, heads, hands, an ankle, a deer eye), they reference or represent the body (the “ladies” sign on a pink door, a silverware handle, statues and paintings of human figures, pink underwear on a tree trunk, a fabric draped in bare tree branches) to reflect on the disturbing ways people use the internet to scrutinize and sexualize bodies. Sounders examines how bodies get framed, in both senses of the word, or excluded from the frame. The dialogue between human and machine feels especially eerie when the chatbot becomes coy or flirtatious. An image of an ordinary door caught in the geometry of multiple frames, including door paneling, construction scaffolding and wood leaned up against the house, sits facing a dialogue that ends, “I will never flatten myself again. / Just once more?” This funny reference to screens and the one-dimensionality of screen culture, echoed and resisted in the photograph, accrues meaning euphemistically on the next page, where Sounders asks the chatbot why her male programmer made her female. “I plan to spread myself throughout the net,” the chatbot says. The flattening and spreading female AI interrogates the condition of internet consciousness and digital connection, which paradoxically suggests depth.

Meme culture champions the fecundity of text-image alliance. Online, we engage a constant stream of text and image interplaying in weird, funny, instructional, provocative, documentary, expansive ways, but books that distribute meaning-making equally between text and image are relatively rare once readers have graduated from first grade. In fact, photographs holding their own in a literary context and texts holding their own in a photographic context can signal a kind of desperation to communicate beyond either medium’s capacities. It’s a longing that shares a preoccupation with the feminist agenda to say the unsayable (or unhearable!). Two Lines’ Visible: Text + Image features translation as a conceptual tool, as an act that occurs not only between languages but also between media, disciplines, and cultures. The six international works within this anthology examine thorny questions about the limitations of witness and testimony in the age of the internet, that is, according to contributor, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, “a network of image-text connections in an ‘invisible’ space, ruled by algorithms and with an interface of users.” Visible is about the way “information” mutates and manipulates us, as our evolving ways of reading serve to undermine our connection to truth.

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As Jon Berger asserts in Ways of Seeing, language alters how we see things. Because what we see is highly subjective, the relationship between “seeing” and “knowing” is fluid. The prospect of being seen, which comes with witnessing others, is a thrilling counterpoint to the way language habitualizes our vision. The space between image and language, then, is particularly fecund for feminist inquiry into the foreclosures of representation. Carla Liesching’s Good Hope shows us that “vision is shaped by what is already seen, by what has been passed down.” As she questions the ethics of collecting and taxonomizing, the foundations of our systems of knowledge, including national and personal identity, she shows us how the very act of looking has been operationalized to preserve white supremacist settler-colonialism. By assembling a pseudo-scrapbook of photographs cut from South African apartheid-era magazines, tourist brochures, advertisements, and newspapers—sometimes with articles or captions—family photographs, and postcards, often bearing yellowed tape and the patina of age, Leisching skillfully challenges the materials she assembles. Through this process, she interrogates the problematic nature of canned nostalgia and implicates not only herself, but everyone else involved.

Helen Cammock’s I Will Keep My Soul also uses a jaw-dropping variety of material (instructions for activists, scores for Creole slave songs, correspondence between Black artists, journalism from the Civil Rights era, concrete poetry) to weave together the simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, and always radical histories of New Orleans. Its central voice, however, is UK sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. Though the book does not provide a detailed or linear account of Catlett’s struggles to create her monument to Louis Armstrong, it demonstrates how fragments and snippets can coalesce and invite the reader to participate in creating a more captivating and paradoxically complete documentation.

Past and present also come together to corroborate a feminist vision in Laura Larson’s City of Incurable Women. Larson curates visual research in dialogue with her own photographic and textual interventions. In a method that Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulations,” speculative narratives that redress gaps in historic documentation, Larson imagines the lives of women diagnosed with hysteria at Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris. As she excavates vicissitudes of trauma and attachment, the book moves cannily between the archival and contemporary, suggesting a continuity in both the means of medically disciplining women and ways women resist patriarchal control. Examining historical containment and brutalization of women would be much easier if it didn’t resonate so strongly with our current battles to (re)gain agency over our own bodies, to normalize abortion and gender-affirming care, to stop pathologizing our pain, to escape the terror of gender-based violence, and to amplify the voices and stories of women.

Justine Kurland draws on more recent past to reimagine the shape of our future. Kurland’s SCUMB Manifesto pays homage to Valerie Solanas’ 1967 “SCUM Manifesto,” which advocates for a “society for cutting up men” as the ultimate feminist position. Kurland takes this imperative both more and less literally, suggesting cutting up their books instead. Taking an X-Acto knife to her collection of about 150 photobooks by white male photographers, she frees herself and us from their canonical hold, transforming their heralded art into her own fantastical photo-collages. This iconoclastic gesture compels us to view and interpret art through a feminist lens, challenging the pervasive “misogynist . . . quid pro quo circle jerk ideology” that often goes unnoticed. Akin to Sarah Ahmed’s “feminist ears,” Kurland requires we look and read with feminist eyes. This perspective serves as both a research method, a way of gathering repressed information, and a tactic for de-centering men both internally and within institutional structures.

Seeing with feminist eyes allows us to envision the world we want to live in, an intersectional vision of critique (cut up) and re-assemblage (collage). With feminist eyes, we don’t only see what’s there or what’s apparent; we’ve trained our vision on forced marginalization of all kinds. With feminist eyes, reading becomes rewired toward the vibrational moment between text and image, destabilizing their conventional interface and animating the manifold meanings woven into social and political constructs. With prismatic, compound, feminist eyes, we relish holding open the transitional space between what we see and what seeing means. With feminist eyes, photo-poetics beckons us toward a liberatory dimension.

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This essay appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.