SOURCE: “Wright Morris's ‘Photo-Texts’,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 109-20.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg attempts to derive the significations of Morris's photo-texts through comparisons with photos by Walker Evans and a poem by Donald Justice.

Wright Morris's inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several unique works of fiction, “photo-texts,” he called them, in which image and text stand to each other in quite unexpected ways.¹ In The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God's Country and My People, (1968) picture and word cohabitate in a manner of mutual and complex exchange.² At a casual glance these works might seem similar to the juxtapositions of word and image in documentary texts popular at the end of the 1930s, but a more careful look and reading makes clear that in spite of some superficial resemblance in depictions of rural scenes they...