TWO GROUPS of young men—three Americans and three Mexicans—confront each other late one evening in an alley in Mexico City. One of the Americans has insulted one of the Mexicans. The only sober member of the American group, the New York Kid, stares at the aggrieved man:

The Kid saw this face as if he and it were alone in space—a yellow mask, smiling in eager cruelty, in satisfaction, and, above all, lit with sinister decision. As for the features, they were reminiscent of an unplaced, a forgotten type, which really resembled with precision those of a...

WITH LOUIS DAGUERRE’S unveiling of the daguerreotype in January 1839, the dream of nature reproducing herself without the aid of human hand or eye seemed finally on the verge of being realized. Because the subject of the photograph seemed to emerge spontaneously—early operators of the daguerreotype, when the exposure time was up to an hour, would simply set up the camera and walk away—the image was often characterized as a peculiar form of self-portrait. “The picture took itself,” declared author Edward Everett Hale; “[t]he artist stands aside and lets you paint yourself,” echoed Ralph Waldo Emerson.¹ In the...

ADMIRING THE Capitol building in 1905, Henry James noted that he had for company “a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie.” The men were dressed, he recounts in The American Scene, “in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits, and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes.” This odd inventory leads to an even odder comparison: James proposes that the modern dress of the Native Americans “quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show.”¹ Like exhibits in a World’s Fair, the men are regarded by...

WHAT IS THE role of photography in determining who people are in a society in which identity is fundamentally determined by blood? This question is surprisingly central, this chapter argues, to William Faulkner’s obsessive inventory of racial identity in the Jim Crow South. As Walter Benn Michaels points out, the law that governed that society—the one-drop rule—reduced “all the things that make [race] visible . . . to mere representations of a racial identity located elsewhere. At the same time, however, because race is invisible and cannot be reduced to any of its representations, any and everything can...

I HAVE BEEN arguing that American fiction’s debt to the camera takes the form of a fascination with questions of resemblance, driven principally by the sense that in the photographic age everyone begins to look the same. It is time, however, to mark the limits to this uniformity. The representation of American homogeneity in what I call photographic fiction borrows its terms from stereotypes such as the indomitable Mexican, the exuberant Italian, and the impassive Indian. According to Bill Brown, such stereotypes can be understood “as the memorializing disavowal of the sameness effected by universal male suffrage.”¹ It is precisely...

THIS BOOK has argued that photography shaped American fiction not by offering novelists a model of faithful reproduction, but by offering them a language in which to record the increasing homogeneity of modern identity, a homogeneity that is itself the product of photography. What American literature’s repeated invocations of the camera tell us is not that the two mediums see the world in the same way but that the world American fiction sees is one shaped by photography. Hence it ultimately does not matter whether American writers see photography as signaling either the impossibility of mimesis or its perfection. Christopher...