Snapshot Seeing: Kodak Fiends, Child Photographers, and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

Abstract

In this article, I argue that James’s What Maisie Knew investigates the consequences of a distinctly modern mode of observation that both depends on and subverts literary naturalism’s trope of the sensually vulnerable but inarticulate brute—a mode of observation much like the kind of snapshot photography that was widely practiced at the turn of the century. With her innate and curiously modern perceptual sensibilities, James’s Maisie gestures toward an anxiety about the potential of naturalism’s brutes to tell their own stories—an anxiety that I argue was also evinced by the rise of snapshot photography as a popular and affordable hobby.

Filtering: A Theory and History of a Style

“…Especially with Kodak's introduction of the mass-produced "Brownie" in 1900-which was advertised as being so easy to use even a child could master it-a "new world" opened up "in which a broader and more diverse group of people could observe, record, and represent themselves and their world than ever before." 21 There were the expected expert backlashes, but the era of middle class self-fashioning had irrevocably arrived in visual form. 22 Filters carry this project forward, but just as they administer simultaneously a wider and a more specified genre of affective range, they also administer roles different from the broader and more disciplinary "family."…”