PARIS.- A respected writer in the United States, the American Wright Morris (1910-1998) adopted an experimental approach to photography, seeking very early to“capture the essence of what is visible”. For the first time in France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is offering a chance to share his vision both photographic and literary of America. This exhibition includes prints, books and documents from the Collection of the Estate of Wright Morris in San Francisco.

Wright Morris spent his childhood shunted between Nebraska, Chicago, his uncles’ farms and accompanying his father on long trips across America. At 23, he travelled through Europe and on his return decided to dedicate himself entirely to writing. He quickly realised that photography could seize what he had until then been attempting to “capture in words”. This formal research led to his first “photo-text”, The Inhabitants (1946), in which fictional texts are paired with photographs mainly taken in Nebraska, where he grew up.

Unlike his fiction which often focuses on flamboyant characters, his photographs are practically devoid of figures. And yet lots of life quietly leaks out between the chairs (omnipresent), mirrors, cars or even wooden architecture (fundamental). It is as if his photographs are rooted in the land, imbued with a disarming simplicity while retaining the enigmatic character of places and objects laid bare, with no human presence to bring them alive. Bard of the intimate, Wright Morris makes the invisible visible and this paradox is probably the most noble intention in photography.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue L’essence du visible and the collection of texts Fragments de temps both published by Éditions Xavier Barral.

EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK
Beyond the quality of the images produced and the interesting invention of the photo-text book, Morris’s photographic work is characterised by another highly stimulating formal aspect. He does not postulate this himself but it is exciting to see it develop throughout his career. From the New Directions portfolios to The Inhabitants, he partly uses the same images, altering their composition, adding different texts to them, changing their order in the sequence. The Home Place is different, since it is the result of a specific photographic campaign carried out in Nebraska in 1947, so it does not include previously published images. But in 1968, God’s Country and My People, draws on the whole of his existing work, including photographs published in the previous two books, with the addition of about thirty “new” images that had not been published but were taken at the same time.

What is striking about this book is that the images reappear not just with variations in composition but also reversed. In 1975, Morris said to Jim Alinder: “On occasion the print is reversed because I failed to see it clearly in the darkroom. On occasion, in terms of design and structure, I like the reversed print better. What I saw in the darkroom often took precedence over what I saw on the ground glass. For me, the “picture” emerges in the developing solution, and it is the magic of this moment that I find the most exciting. I see my subject through the lens, but I conceive the picture in the darkroom. Photography is camera obscura.”

Besides his photo-text books, the exploration continues with exhibition catalogues and monographs later published. The resulting impression is of a body of work endowed with a capacity to be transformed, even multiplied, where the simple reversal of an image allows us to rediscover it, or see it quite differently. The idea of an artist sticking to a limited collection of work and constantly rearranging it, creating different propositions, is another unique and innovative aspect of Morris’s creativity. Here again, he was ahead of his time but was never recognised as a groundbreaker by those who came after him, particularly conceptually, like Evans who has been celebrated by several generations until today for his “documentary style” and the legacy he left. We all have a vision of the United States, even if we have not seen it, lived in it or passed through it; this is the vision we get from films, literature and photography. The vision we are given by Wright Morris, of Nebraska in particular, is both familiar, in that it conforms to our expectations (wide open spaces), and original. Who spoke to us about this state, showed it to us and took us there before he did? [...]
Each place, inside or out, is charged with the presence, with all the presences, not of a crowd but of each individual following those who came before, without one taking precedence over the other. The photographer transmits this invisible life as well as the image of what is there. He does this with just his photographs. He does it even better when they are combined with his texts, so we hear the voice of those we cannot see but who are truly there. He also manages, magically, to stop us connecting a given setting with a specific person but instead with a life that does not exclude others.

In three photo-text books, by rearranging the same favourite images of a limited body of work, sometimes reversing them, or combining them within another story of a different tone, Morris achieves the fluidity characterising the way an entire people inhabits these places we cannot precisely locate, but which are nevertheless defined. Concretely, we see these overlapping pieces of wood, this wall of old tyres, these stacks of corn, these silver metal knives and forks on a bed of newspaper (“Save These Children?”), as if we’re touching them with our fingers. We could walk towards this blinding white Neogothic church, this patch of shade under a porch, the kettle on the brick stove in the kitchen.

In a few phrases, we read the correspondence between a father and his son; about a pioneer’s trail; about the feelings, on the evening of a birthday, of a boy whose mother died. These places are inhabited, simply, powerfully, regardless of the captivating formal, conceptual puzzle created by the writer-photographer; drawing on a whole collection created in just over a decade. --Anne Bertrand